AI is killing mediocrity 🤖 | Oliver Yonchev

I think the best foundation for any entrepreneur, and I genuinely believe this, is self-belief and raising your aspirations. And it seems like a Fugazi thing if I said to you, believe in something you don't. Very hard. Very hard to do. But I think belief is self-fulfilling. I think optimism is self-fulfilling. You're going to receive a lot of nos. You're going to face friction. You're going to face challenges. Just having that mindset or trying to draw on something to allow you to have belief and raise your aspirations, I think will serve you better than any tangible advice I give you.

This week's Millennial Master is Oliver Yonchev, co-founder of Co-Created and an entrepreneur known for co-founding Flight Story with Stephen Bartlett and previously being a founding member of social chain. He went from ambitious footballer and indie rocker in Barnsley to launching viral marketing agencies, and now he's building startups at record speed. In this episode, we talk about how self-belief and delusional ambition beat any business tactic, what it really takes to launch and scale in the UK and the US, and what most people get wrong about it, and how AI is changing the game for entrepreneurs and why mediocre work just won't cut it. Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt—fast, reliable web hosting built for founders. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling an app, Jolt gives your project a rock-solid home starting from just £3.95 a month. You'll get 99.99% uptime, support in under 30 seconds, and flexible payment options including Bitcoin and Amex, so you can rack up those points while you build. Get your first 3 months free at jolt.co.uk. Smart hosting for people building what's next.

Oliver, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today?

Daniel, wonderful. I'm not usually a morning person. I'm a binge on YouTube till 3 AM type of person. But here we are. It's early. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I know the feeling. I'm also there too. I've actually been playing with AI agents all night, but we can talk about that later. So let's go straight into your story for now. Because Oliver, I know you've described growing up in Barnsley as low aspiration, but also being delusionally ambitious as a young footballer, then an indie rocker, then stumbling into music promotion in Huddersfield. So I'm wondering, what was that early period really like? Did you imagine it would ever be the launchpad for everything you do now?

Yeah, it's really interesting. I think growing up, so a little bit of context. I grew up in Barnsley. Barnsley is an old mining town. So after the '80s, basically industry left. It was quite an affluent area for many years. So you have, you know, a lot of people that have grown up that have family in the area that feel disconnected. And I remember growing up, the heights of the imagination of my peers, my friends were to be you know, a scaffolder or a bricklayer. And like, there is nothing wrong with that. But my view on reflection is when you're young, you should be delusional. You don't have the curse of knowledge. You should probably aim a little higher and you shouldn't have limitations or you shouldn't impose them on yourself. So I grew up in an area of low aspiration. Conversely, I had a wonderful upbringing, always encouraged to try lots of things, do lots of things, participate in lots of things. And whether that is conditioning from upbringing, nurturing, or whether that was some, you know, genetic disposition. I feel very blessed because I always grew up very ambitious, a lot of self-belief. I remember a story early on, you do a careers class and, uh, I was going to say I won't name her, but it was Mrs. Smith. And I remember her saying— That's pretty generic.

So that will fly.

It's as generic as it probably could be, right? And I remember her saying to me, what do you want to be? I was like, a footballer. She's like, no, seriously, what do you want to be? I went, no, I'm going to be a footballer. Admittedly, on reflection, Mrs. Smith was right. I didn't follow a footballer. But it's just that challenging of putting limitations on young minds where they're impressionable and you're trying to figure out your identity. As I said, I was blessed delusionally ambitious. I spent my early career pursuing football. At about 16, I went into the semi-pro leagues, the first time you were about to get paid to play football. And it's a much more physical sport. You're transitioning from youth leagues to adult leagues. And I got an injury. And at the time, I was also playing drums. So I decided to pursue music at college. And that sent my life on a very different path. I joined a band, ended up for a few years doing college, but joining a band, had a record deal, and I now identify as a failed indie rocker. I could identify as a failed football player. However, there's still a little part of me thinks I'll get the call-up one day.

I actually had it in my note as you identified as a failed indie rocker, but I didn't want to mention it. I wanted to let you say it.

I'll say it.

And then from being in a band, you moved on to music promotion, which I guess that was the early, early start of your career in marketing.

Yeah, so after 4 and a half years of doing a band, and I'd probably say there's a reflection that my life has been in 5-year chapters, and most of us go through, you know, 4 to 5-year chapters. If you think of education, you think of career pursuits, you tend to have these blocks. So I went to university, sorry, I'd finished, I'd Finished music and I didn't know what to do. So I knew music, studied music, and part of my module was promotion. So it was quite an eclectic course in Huddersfield, everything from music law to marketing to comms to— Quite a specialist one as well. Yeah, it was an unusual course. It was a makeup to give you the tools to expose you to different aspects of the music industry. So did that for a few years and I found myself enjoying marketing. And that felt like there would be a lot of opportunities. So post-university, I joined a graduate scheme for a large media owner, and that was what was the start of my media and marketing career.

But things took off a bit later on because most people know you as a co-founder of Social Chain and Flight Story. But it all started with a random Facebook DM to Stephen Bartlett. So I'm wondering what actually made you reach out and how did those first conversations spark a 10-year partnership?

Yeah, so like most people, you start to get itchy feet and then I was coming up to my 4-year cycle and started, and I really had great mentors around me in the media business. I was doing really well, objectively, probably paid too much money for what I did. I was pretty good at it. And I remember wanting to start my own thing. So I collect domains like people collect watches. So I have an idea. How many?

I know a few people who do that. So how many domains do you have?

You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Well over 100.

You're doing well, but also the renewal rates when they come.

You know what, every year it's an offensive amount of renewal fees I spend on domains. What I will say is I do have a good graveyard of ideas and that bank of names, brand ideas that never lived. It serves me well in what I currently do. But going back, I sort of started to get itchy feet. I began to pursue businesses. I set up my first business was a light bulb business, very obscure. And I simply wanted to learn how to sell things on the internet. And this is going back a few years. There were no low-code solutions, no Shopify. You had to go build a website.

It had to be What sort of year are we talking about? Just so we can place it in internet history.

Oh, God. This will be 2000 and— I'm going to say 2008, 2009.

Okay. Okay. Just at the beginning of the social media era. Yes. Yeah.

So it was a little more difficult. Don't get me wrong. We're not talking early internet, but we are saying it was a little harder for someone that has no background in engineering or web development to go build a website. So I partnered actually with a friend of mine and I tried to start to sell websites. And the whole idea was, could I ship a product on a high margin to the UK and start selling it? I quickly realized that although I had built a website, I learned how to sell it online. I quickly realized I had zero passion for light bulbs. I didn't care. And business can be difficult. It doesn't go the way you think it's going to go more often than not. And as a consequence, I probably learned quite an important lesson that you have to be rooted in something you care about or something you're exceptionally good at. And I think the two often merge when you achieve mastery in a topic, you often develop a passion or a love for that specific skill.

And you just didn't feel the love for selling websites?

Selling light bulbs. So absolutely. Yeah, absolutely not. It wasn't my, it was called GoLights. Okay. But fast-track a little bit, I started to have more and more ideas, and there was a few that I fell in love with. One was a coffee business. This, I had an idea to have coffee subscriptions at commuter locations. I was buying 2 coffees a day on my commutes into work. I went to the same place. I thought, what a great business if I could get a subscription model in small kiosks. Conventional wisdom of coffee shops was people put laptops there, spend a lot of time. So a physical subscription.

Subscription as well for physical coffee, not what we would think today of getting coffee at home through a subscription. Yeah.

You know, Pret, the subscription that came many years later. So this was called Coffee Unlimited. So I started to pursue that and it was from my observations of the world around me. And that was probably the first inventive, interesting idea I had. Adjacent to that, I had another idea called Just Blend. And it's really interesting. Just Blend was, I'd been away and there's, I'd I noticed obviously people making healthier choices and there'd just been the rise of Innocent. And I read the book by the Innocent founders, their story, and I thought it was quite inspirational. And there's something about the physical participation of your food and your preparation. So my idea was, could I send iced bags of fruit through the post? It was called JustBlend. You'd get a blender as part of your subscription. And then that was, that was the business. It was a subscription service to healthy smoothies that you made yourself. And I modelled it out. It was really interesting. And I managed to get myself a pitch with an investor on this particular business. So bear in mind, I'm still working my job. I developed—

And you were in your early 20s? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sort of coming up to my mid-20s, actually, by this point. And I pitched to the founder of a large broadband business who happened to be a client of mine in my day job. So he entertained me, gave me the time, went for lunch. And I remember vividly having this conversation and dinner, and I spent 30 minutes talking at him. I was so excited. And he turned around at the end of it and he said, look, Oliver, he said, I really like you. I think there's maybe something in this idea you have, but I have a bit of advice. It's not for me right now. I tend to get involved in businesses a little later down the line. However, you are through and through a marketeer. And he said this to me because he went, you spent 25 minutes telling me about the brand, the image, how you're going to market this, how you're going to communicate it, how it will be sold, your ambassadors. You had all these ideas for growing this business. And he said, you spent 3 to 5 minutes talking about the product and the actual business itself. He went, you are a marketeer. My advice to you is go find someone who cares about product, obsesses about operations, and you would have a very good pairing. So I kind of, I sat on that wisdom for a little bit. And at the point I remember looking on social media and I saw a TED Talk from Stephen Bartlett. The TED Talk basically was him talking about building a multimillion-dollar business, knowing very little about business. And for me, that spoke to me. So I reached out to him with no intent other than I sent him a message that was, "To your talk, I think you've had an inspiring story. Keep up the good work, my man." It was like really crude, straight to the point message. And he said to me, um, hey, would you like to meet? We're a growing business in Manchester. Um, I'd love to have a conversation. So reached out to him. I went to meet him in his office and I think I fell in love with what he was doing. So I decided to join his startup. I remember at the time it felt like a cliff edge. It felt like a big moment in my life because I had this safe corporate career. I knew even that I really liked the people I worked with. I knew it wasn't giving me fuel and I wanted more because I was setting up businesses and trying to find something. And this idea then of migrating into like a very early stage startup, was felt like a nice step. So I joined Steve, that took me on a path for about 5 years through Social Chain. We went through an IPO, I moved to the US, I spent about 4 years in New York building out the US entity with Steve, and then the 5-year cycle comes around again, and by this point, Steve and I were very good friends, and he said, do you want to set up a new business with me? And I said, I just got an 18-month lease in my new apartment in New York, and this is a month in, and I thought, I gotta move back to the UK. I'm gonna do it. Opportunity comes knocking. I have a ton of admiration for Steve. So we, we started a company called Flight Story and spent what was 3 years building that. And this is sort of looking over the course of almost 10 years of working together. And last summer I had an opportunity to sell my stake in the business and I decided to do the solo act. And I say solo act. I've done it with some, with a few partners of mine. And that's where we are today.

I want to just unpick a couple of things by the time we get to Co-Created, which is your latest venture, and it's fuel for your entrepreneurial ambitions. Because you obviously rose through the ranks at Social Chain, and then you actually led the operations when in the US and in New York. But you said in a different podcast that you failed miserably for a year. So I'm wondering what was the US learning curve like? What did you take from that experience? How is building a business in the UK different to building a business in the US? Because a lot of entrepreneurs have dreams of building a business there too. Yes. And you had firsthand experience.

Yeah, there were a lot of late learnings. You assume because we share the language that the US is similar to the UK. It's absolutely not. We have some things that bond us and are familiar. There are many things that are not. So naively, we went into the US market, assumed that the world cared, and the UK business was doing very well by this point. We'd expanded into Europe. Naturally, the US was the big market that we were going to take on. We assumed the world cared and no one cared. So it was a very awakening experience to realize, oh, this is day zero in the UK. The world's biggest brands knocked on our door because of the reputation of the company of being the kids that run the internet, the social media Illuminati. We had this almost cult-like status in the UK. In the US, that didn't transcend, and it's the most competitive market in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of service businesses. You're in the mecca of capitalism in New York, where things are aggressive, fast-paced, intense, big opportunities. You feel like you're at the top of the world, you're insignificant in the same sentence. And we spent a year banging our head against the wall. And then at some point it clicked. We built a really good native team, but we preserved some of the identity that we had from the UK business, but we realized we had to build again. And we had an opportunity to build again with the reflections we'd had of all the things that you wish you'd done slightly differently. So within about a year, the tide started to turn and we had a monumental uplift. So we went from year 1 where the business did about, I'm going to say £600,000 revenue, lost half a million quid. And then Steve and I went out to the US. So we moved out there. Year 2, it did about £2.5 million. And then by year 3, we went up to about $15 million. And then year 4, we expanded through several acquisitions. And then the US entity was the largest, most profitable part of the media business within a 4-year period. And every large contract that was in the UK was 5 times bigger in the US. We had a small but mighty team, really young, ambitious. And New York's a hotpot of talent because you have Maybe two worlds coming together. You have one world that is of great privilege. You've been educated very well. New York's an expensive city, so a lot of young people that make it there come from privilege. Very smart, very intelligent. Alongside that, you have hustlers, people that just really want to make it in the world. And, um, you know, the grinders, the resilient, and just that hotpot. We had a phenomenal team as a consequence of that. We punched above our weight and I did really well. And if I would give any words of wisdom to anyone entering the US, one, you have to recognise that the US is not one place, it's 50 places. A family in Atlanta is very different to a family in LA and New York. There are cultural—

State by state, so very different.

Like Europe. It's like saying Europe is one place. It's the same thing. Yes, bonded by language, but it is very different. The next is it will be a lot more expensive than you think, as in it will put a drain on other parts of your businesses. I know a lot of very successful UK marketing companies and the founders would say to me, it was much harder than they anticipated. The UK businesses or European operations started to suffer when the founding teams and the key drivers went out there. So you need to be prepared for distraction. And the third bit of advice is, and this is more general in entering new markets, always have the people that are your best salespeople in that territory. And the reason for that is the number one job when you're day zero, no one knows who you are, no one cares about you. You have to be good at communicating. You have to be good at selling your story, selling your story to team members to convince them to take a risk and join you, selling your team to your clients, to your customers, to suppliers. So for all of those reasons, that's a big anchor stone. And that's probably why at Social Chain, the business didn't work as well in year 1 because Stephen hadn't moved there. I hadn't moved there. So, um, you were the key players and the key ambassadors for the brand. It feels like, um, it feels a very self-indulgent thing to say, but the reality is there are, we, we represented the source of truth in the sense of being able to communicate what was special about the company. So I think that was an advantage. There are many things that myself, possibly Steve, were not good at, and there were far better people than us at doing certain aspects of the business. But communicating what the business was, pitching, building teams, they were areas that we thrived, and that was advantageous.

And that was an exciting chapter, but you were coming around to another 5-year cycle. So I'm wondering, what was the moment, even though things were booming, and you, you grew the business exponentially in the US, you were living in New York, and you were also looking into starting Flight Story, I'm wondering, what was the moment when you knew it was time to step away and start again? Was there a particular event, particular a feeling you had, some restlessness, a challenge because you already scaled so much and so high?

You know, it was actually the opposite. Things got easier. It was getting more comfortable. You know, I've always felt that when my life has propelled forward in a meaningful way, the precursor to that has always been feeling very uncomfortable. A challenge, moving to a new country in this instance. At this point, I'd become familiar, life was great. Around 6 months prior, Stephen had exited Social Chain, so he left the business. And I think with him leaving, some of the kind of core identity that made the company special also left with him. And through that process and knowing that he was about to embark on a new chapter, the moment and the choice was relatively simple for me at that point when when he said, let's do something. I kind of learnt enough by this point. And Steve always uses a framework that he says is quitting is for winners. Knowing when to quit at the right time is something that you typically find from people that have phenomenal careers or great entrepreneurs. They understand when is that moment to change path, to jump ship. And it's typically when you're riding on a high. Ideally, because you have leverage. Quitting when you have to quit is not ideal, right? I know. Quitting when you can quit, that's leverage. That's choice. When you get to do things on your term and choice, it means you can set your follow-up terms how you want them. So I think not everyone is privileged to be— you can be put in different circumstances and I've been quite fortunate at different stages to have choice. But yeah, the quitting framework is quite a healthy, healthy one is, and the overriding question that you should ask yourself is, is the pain and struggle worth it? And if you, if the answer to that is no, if I stay and I keep doing this, will the pain and struggle be worth it? If the answer is no, that should be an obvious choice for you. Mine was more guided by opportunity. There's this other variable, which is You can't predict when the right opportunity hits you. And that was my choice.

So once you made the move out of Social Chain, did you take any time off to enjoy the fruits of your hard labor after— recalibrate?

No, no, no, no, not at all. I have an absolutely toxic work ethic. A lot of conventional wisdom was take some time, you've earned it, go travel, go do things. And I've always had a very fulfilling life and great relationships. Relationships, and for me, I never felt the need. The, it's in part, maybe the curse of ambition, always wanting to ride with momentum. But when you come out of a process like that and you go back to day zero, that's humbling. There's a lot of work to do. And I was very dissatisfied with the idea. There was no intent that I was going to be part of a small business. It wasn't, and I'm very aware that building something from zero is difficult and hard. So you have to, it's almost a non-negotiable to have a toxic work ethic and a resilience. So zero time off, straight into building Flight Story. Flight Story wasn't what it is today. It started as one mandate. It then evolved every 6 months. You were reiterating, and there's an important lesson in that. Most people are looking for the perfect answer. Or they're thinking of the business they want to see in 3 to 5 years or beyond. The reality is the best thing you can do is just start. And through the process of starting, you get feedback. Feedback is insight. Insight then leads you to make better decisions and you reiterate your way to these big moments. So yeah, we, we spent 3 years building the business, started in corporate comms, specifically investor relations. There was a very specific reason for that. It then evolved and merged more into a set of services, marketing services with a shared mandate. It then evolved as the media business started to run adjacent. So there was a lot of moving pieces. And I would say across those few years, it felt like, at times it felt like 30 years because so much was happening. Every single week felt like moving mountains. And if you've ever been part of an organization that has that momentum, It's very exciting. It's very exciting, taxing, challenging. There are many flaws. You're building the aeroplane as you're riding it, right? So in doing so, you know, you get things wrong. Maybe not everything's perfect. The culture is not right for everyone. You know, there's a lot of stuff you reflect on. Oh, we should have been better there. We maybe were negligent there. But ultimately, the business is on a phenomenal path. There's an exceptional management team there. Steve's got a much clearer vision of building out a media and investment business now, which took a few years to get there. And then, as I said—

In a way, because you were building something that didn't really exist in that format, there wasn't a playbook for it. You were writing a playbook. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

And then, then last summer, I just decided through part opportunity, but also kind of the itchy feeling again, and a lot of reflections of where I had value and decided to create Co-Created. And Co-Created had been an idea that had sat on my shelf.

You had the domain. How long did you have the domain for?

I didn't have the domain for very long, actually. The name came after, but the concept of the business model. And I'll explain Co-Created. So Co-Created, we are a venture studio and fundamentally our point of difference, we're not an accelerator, we're not an incubator, we're not a venture firm. We are co-founders. And my belief is, and I look at this as a, at a macro level, my belief is that if you give someone that has skills, expertise, domain knowledge, real co-founder support, you raise their aspirations and belief, usually something that holds a lot of people back. You stop them walking into walls and make better decisions in those formative years. You can really stack the odds in a founder's favor. So my view or vision was, if I zoom out a little further, where is the world going? I think because of technology, because of AI, there will be a lot of shifts. One of them is organizational design. So unfortunately, large companies will get smaller, which means displacement, which means talented people will have to choose agency and have to build their own thing. But I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I think sometimes people need a jolt to send them in the right direction. And if I believe more and more people will need to start businesses, there needs to be better support at day zero. So that was a starting theory. The next was as technology gets easier and easier to create, the technical limitations are removed. What are the skills of the future? I believe marketeers, creatives have those skills. They know how to communicate, they obsess over customer, they know how to capture attention, but most marketeers don't identify as entrepreneurs. They identify as marketeers. I've been through this myself of going, oh, I'm a marketeer. You build marketing businesses. No, we can build any business.

We know with marketing and sales, you can, you can build any business. Yeah.

100%. So my view was the creative industry is underrepresented in venture. It doesn't have the support system. So focusing in that field, which has been my industry for 15 years, would be advantageous. And then the final thing is. Through technology, smaller teams no longer have diseconomies of scale. They're no longer limited by limited resources. They can do so much more. They can defy their economic restrictions. So when you take that, my view is you help people at day zero, you raise their aspirations, you put the support structures, you embed technology into what they do from day zero, not reverse engineering clunky processes. Could you build better businesses faster? And create a lot more value. And so far we're 8 months into this journey. And the answer is categorically yes. We've launched 7 businesses. The first 3 are out trading, doing phenomenally well. You have—

it's almost one a month, or was it a bulk that you got out in batches?

Our aim was we are going to launch 10 businesses every year and doing that while building our own operations and central ops. And this is all self-funded between me and my partners. So you go through this process and you realize that it's been relentless. I do literally work 7 days a week from morning till, you know, midnight. Like, this is not an exaggeration. It's a choice I make. I won't be like this forever. It's not sustainable what I do now, but we're in a sprint period. We're in a sprint period because we made it our mission to launch 10 businesses year 1. And these are not shitty businesses. These are phenomenal founders with great ideas that are doing tremendously well. This is not— I think from my perspective, there's something really rewarding as well about helping early-stage founders, because as you go through the different growth stages of a business, you become desensitized to the highs, to the lows, and that serves you in some instances. You're usually balanced when things go wrong, but you're also not excited when things go right. And because I'm now surrounded by early-stage entrepreneurs that are so excited, that is giving me fuel. It's making me sharper. I'm growing. Contagious energy. Contagious. So again, this was something I didn't anticipate with Co-Created. The community dynamics of people doing different things, serving different missions, but going on a similar journey at the same time. What that does for camaraderie, sharing opportunity, helping each other, having fun. So for all of these reasons, phenomenal.

So let's break it down then. What, when it comes to Co-Created, what's the earliest stage you have been involved in one of these businesses? Is it just past the idea stage? Is it an MVP? You said you launched some businesses to market, so clearly you've been involved in an earlier stage. And then looking at the stage of the business as well, are you mainly working with solo founders who need the bounce back energy into the other areas, or you already have some co-founders who you then add in with the rest of the skills you're plugging in? Yes.

When we started this, we weren't entirely sure at what stage of the journey. We knew early was where we added the most value, where we would get our hands dirty and we'd deliver disproportionate upside for our contribution. However, we are now Basically exclusively day zero, meaning some of our businesses we have conceived, we've prototyped, we've built the ideas and then brought in founders to help us run and build those businesses. Okay. These have been co-founding teams, if with technical founders and people with domain expertise, commercial leads. Alongside that, people have come to us with seeds of ideas before they're built and we will build the prototype with them. The earlier the better for us, because again, that's where we think we can add the most value. And that's why I say we are not— our mandate, the first thing you will see when you go on our website is co-founders first, investors second. Yes, we'll give you some money to help you along the way. And if we don't write enough, big enough check, we will go get the money for you. We'll bring in outside capital if it's a more ambitious mandate. But fundamentally what we do is we bring me and my partners, a huge amount of focus, energy, time, hands-on support. We now plug in the co-created community, meaning all the other founders that do different things. We bring in all the support services, everything from AI agents to the right type of corporate governance through to the right lawyer. We bring in all the support systems and we do it with you. And each time we've gone through it, the first business took us 3 months to launch. We're now getting to the point where we can launch a business in 2 weeks. And next week we're announce a competition with a partner where we're going to do at a festival in the UK, a launch a business live competition in 48 hours. So think of it as the theater where we invite people onto a main stage to pitch their ideas, to win £100,000 support package to help them launch. And this is for us to showcase what we're capable of. I look at most venture and most venture capital have never In the UK, the US is a little different. Most people in venture have never built businesses. They bring money. We build businesses. We get our hands dirty. We're with you at 3 AM rewriting your copy for you because it's not good enough. We hold very high standards. We're not the people that give you money and walk away. And for me, that's fuel. I love that because I don't want to be a passive participant in my own success. We only win if you win. And I would rather contribute to that than just give you money and hope you figure it out.

And setting up a win and being there part of the early journey is much more important than, as you've said from your previous experiences, hitting lots of walls until you have your learnings, which prolongs your journey. And with things being so fast-paced today, you can easily stumble and fall.

Hundred percent, a hundred percent. And the formative years, those early years are some of the hardest. You have the least amount of knowledge. You're usually walking in uncharted waters. You generally don't have the structures and systems. You're doing most things yourself. So they're the hardest. And as I say, that giving people that level of co-found— when I say co-found, I'm talking lots of people doing lots of different things. We add a disproportionate amount of value. Yeah, it's been, look, we don't have all the answers. I speak with complete conviction and confidence, but I have conviction today in what we're doing. And the beautiful thing for me, from a selfish point of view, is when I started Co-Created, I didn't have a 5-year plan. I don't have an intention to sell something. I genuinely want to build a company that is potentially the starting place for hundreds of successful businesses. And that to me is exciting.

So you work with UK and US entrepreneurs or around the world?

Primarily UK, because that's where we can best serve. We did make some early seeds into the US. We're in discussions with some partners in Germany to launch an SPV, collaboration venture, to take some IP. And turn it into a business. So there are a few things we're working on, but primarily the UK for obvious reasons, time zone, levels of support. Our mandate and mission will be global. So give us a few years and this will be a very different conversation.

You're, you're in your first year, so it makes sense. So how do you see then the UK? What sort of role does the UK play in the global startup market. Many people I've been speaking to say UK is great for early-stage startups and building an idea up to a certain point, but then it becomes challenging to scale and go outside of the country to go into Series A, Series B, and get some more serious investment in the business. How do you see it from where you stand with Co-Creator?

I think it depends. Look, we, there's a, an initiative in the UK called SCIS and EIS, which basically acts as a tax offset for angel investors or early stage investing. That's a phenomenal program to mean that very early stage pre-seed companies get the capital they need to pursue their mission and their mandate. So that's a phenomenal aspect. Particularly in the UK.

SEIS up to £250,000 and EIS up to £2 million, right?

Yes. So, um, so, so for anyone, if you removed that legislation or that particular programme, the UK startup ecosystem would die. It would, it would die. It would not live because once you get out of pre-seed and early stage, European, and I'll not just say Britain, I think Britain is one of the best of European nations. In terms of encouraging entrepreneurship. We have the academia, we have the talent, the regulatory governance, we have the prestige, we have a very strong capital market, not very strong, but we have capital markets. So there are institutions that support the country that mean entrepreneurs can thrive here. What I will say is it gets difficult because for you to raise £2 million in Europe is so much harder than raising $10, $20 million in the US. It's just way harder. And that's the European mindset, low risk, particularly as you start to move into areas like Germany, you know. One of my observations of certain European countries, and this is a little different in the UK, but there is no distinction between making a €1,000 decision and a €1 million decision. They put the same amount of energy, the same amount of effort in making making an assessment and due diligence, which is ridiculous. Americans have this way of putting disproportionate value, and the ambition of America is kind of self-fulfilling. When you write someone a $100 million cheque, two things happen. They make dumb decisions, hire too many people, and they make lots of mistakes. However, the other thing is their aspirations raise a lot. And they can only win if they go big. So those two factors again, are kind of self-fulfilling.

That's why most of the giants that we see today are coming from America, even though they don't necessarily, say, produce there.

Yeah. Look at, look at the great companies, even the great European companies now that are coming out of AI, Minstrel, Lovable, all, you know, phenomenal European startups. They're basically primarily, you know, getting backed by US capital. There is a movement. I think Harry Stebbins is a kind of cool voice of pro-European, backing pro-European businesses. So I think there's this convergence of kind of coming together in the post-Brexit era where a lot of UK startups identify as European. And there's kind of this push to look, the UK economy is tough. There is no denying that. However, if you blame the country you're in for you not succeeding as a startup, you are wildly misguided. You're not succeeding in your startup because of you, your decisions, and your team. The minute you give power to your country to decide whether you're going to make it or not is so liberating. It's so— that's crushing to me. The fact I, I'm not going to blame any country for any failures I have. That's on me. So I think that's the mindset entrepreneurs should have. We need to stop blaming. And this tax conversation is—

I wanted to ask you about that and the exodus to Dubai and what's your hot take on it?

So this is the funny thing, right? Generally, you don't start businesses to mitigate your tax bill. I remember the first time I spoke to an accountant. And I went, is there any way that you can help me pay less tax? And he went, Oliver, I want to correct you. If you're paying a lot of tax, that means you're doing really well. So well done you. And I went, okay, good point. That was a remodelling. You also have this movement where when people start, they start where it's in the best interest of them. So if the best interests of you and your business is in the UK, you will do it in the UK if you live here. However, once you've made it, And if you're in the digital economy where mobility is much easier, yes, people will move. And of course, people are exploring in a virtual economy, zero-tax destinations, Dubai, sunshine, a lot of the European states from Cyprus has, you know, very favourable tax rates. So there are Portugal for a period had very strong incentives. Some of these places also rank very high in the corruption league tables, but That's another thing where you have an aggregation of people that don't want to pay tax. I would argue there's probably a lot of corruption, but like, it's not a shocker that there's corruption and low taxes.

So we got your hot take on Dubai then. If you're in the— you need to keep in mind where is the best environment and where you can find the most people, but you touched on a very important element, which is the digital business. And being able to operate from anywhere nowadays with the added element of AI coming into play and not requiring as many staff as you would before, thanks to Agentic AI. And there's a lot of it is still in development. So I wanted to dial it back to when you said that without as many jobs being available, people need to have agency, or just to put it like they need to take their life in their and come up with an idea and start building a business. What do you think?

Sorry, go on. Sorry. I think it's important to just say on that point, it's not they have to. People will be forced to. The fallacy of a stable long-term career has gone. The paths that myself and people that came before me had, the opportunities they had, they no longer exist and they certainly won't exist in the future. So you can either complain about that, be intimidated by that, or you can do something about it. And my view is the earlier that you can start to make steps towards a form of entrepreneurship, and that can mean just diversifying your revenue streams beyond your core career. Finding ways to— So you mean side hustle there? Potentially. Side hustle. I say side hustle. I just think be a bit more thoughtful and and in Britain, we have this deep loyalty to the companies we work for. The problem with that is companies will turn their back on you the moment they have to. Companies by definition will be self-preserving. Yes, they are a group of people, but business is difficult. Things are uncertain. And you've seen this particularly in professional services, in knowledge work, that's marketing industry, across law, all these institutions and pro services we thought were untouchable a few years ago are getting absolutely slammed from every direction. I think one of the large holding companies, it might have been GroupM or MediaCom, they laid off 45% of their staff in review. I'm probably bastardizing that, but it's insane. You're talking an organization with 100,000 people and letting 45,000 people up for review. That is a meteoric shift. So if you don't think you have to make a headway into some form of additional income, doesn't have to be a business, I think you're misguided.

So what are the hot areas then that people should be looking at starting a business or at least considering an idea?

So the one thing you shouldn't do is go, I'm going to do the AI for X. I'm gonna do the AI for this field or this field. AI is ubiquitous. It is a foundational, it's like saying I'm going to build a business and the internet will be involved. Of course, AI is going to be involved. So I think— Touching all aspects across the board.

Yeah.

AI is not new. It was a term coined back in 1967. We've been interfacing through algorithms, through automation for several decades now. So AI is not new. The generative era, and the accelerated development across multiple fields of AI. Yes, things are converging and moving faster, but fundamentally the technology has been around a long time. What I will say is, where should you focus your energy? Number one, I think domain expertise and knowledge is really important because you will deeply understand the problem better than any outside party will.. So for example, if I've built marketing companies, and I've built marketing teams and agencies, I have, I know the nuance of the problems and the things that marketing agency founders care about because it's a lived experience. The same can be said across any profession. If you've worked in beauty or cosmetics for many years, you'll know the nuance of supply chains. You'll know the nuance of, you know, communication. You'll know all the aspects, the trends, the culture. My view is pick a domain, it has to be anchored to some domain authority. The next is try and understand what could be defendable. And what I mean by defendable, in my view, is brand is defendable. If you have the best agent brand in the world, then you might succeed. I think legislation makes a business defendable. If there's a high regulatory bar, into the field you want to build a business in. That's also defendable. Regulation will move slowly despite technology moving quickly. If you are in the analogue world where experience is at the core of what you do, as more and more of our lives are digitised, what is the counterbalance? People want experience. People still—

And they spend more on it. Yeah.

They spend more on it. The value, what we value in society is shifting. So for many of that, for all of those reasons, think about those factors when you're building a business. And underpinning all of that, you should only build a business if you think you can do something better, faster, or cheaper. And I say cheaper because the price of doing a lot of things is coming down radically.

And just to touch on the price of doing a lot of things, that's because of the no-code, low-code solutions, which allow you to build at least a tech stack much quicker, is Is that what you're referring to?

Yes and no. So when I say the cost of everything, the cost of deep thinking work and planning and strategy and business consulting is a £20 a month subscription on ChatGPT. That will be far superior to 99% of consultants in the world, unfortunately. You're talking about image generators, video generators, voice synthesizers, you know, simple editing tools now that are more modular, web design that again is more modular. I will say the no-code, vibe coding arena is brand new. It's nascent and people overplay it. You can't build production-scale proper applications and businesses. You just can't.

You can do a demo. You can do a good demo that you can pitch.

Yeah. You can do a prototype and it's real and it's a thing. You can do that very quickly at a low cost, which would have been We've basically taken what would have been £20,000 of development work and we've given that away for free. That like cohort. But I've, I currently work with some phenomenal engineers and I promise you that the depths of building real scalable products and the amount of knowledge and insight you have to have on backend and user UX experience and knowledge and bringing those two worlds together, plus marketing, plus business models. The product is, it's one small part of the equation. Big part, I say small, it's a big part of the equation, but yeah, I think—

Possibly gonna develop though, because as we've seen generative AI moving leaps and bounds in the last two years, so will the vibe coding tools. They will get so much better at building architecture, but right now I agree with you. They are not. But I think you—

Yeah, I look, the rate of improvement is accelerated. All of these models are built on language. Language is ubiquitous. So when you have an advancement in one field, what started as text, you have an advancement across all fields. Text is a language. Audio is a language. Video is a language. Code is a language. DNA is a language. So you are seeing this acceleration. So I'm fully with you. What I will say is there's still a bigger gap than people think. The internet has a way of proliferating the extremes. And the reality is there's still a much bigger gap. And as I say, it's more, it's the same, like there's a massive gap to close between AI that can independently do anything really creative. There's still quite a big gap. Equally, there's a big gap between building products. But to your point, who knows how quickly that's going to close.

But you've been blunt that mediocre work will be automated away by AI. So you said you need to have an excellent product. But one of the thesis that I've been writing about, and other founders have told me as well, is you could have a great brand, you could have a great product, but distribution is key, and getting it into people's brands. And you will know from your marketing experience that with organic social reach being pretty much dead at the moment, and it's not looking like it's gonna change, the challenges are going to accelerate for a lot of founders and builders getting their product in front of people.

So where I would disagree, you said they can have a great brand. That's a very narrow broad definition. People don't have great brands. Brands take many years to build. There's a lot of research. A brand takes on average about 7 years to build where it's any market penetration. So when people say we have a good brand, they say we have nice images.

When people talk about— Or a cute logo.

Yeah, they're not the same thing. A brand is everything someone thinks about you when you're not in the room. That's a brand. It's the essence of everything you do. It's the product, it's the image, it's the communication, it's how you treat customers, it's every touchpoint, the culmination of those things. So my view on is brand is always defendable, number one. So if you have a brand, most people think they have one, they don't. Most people do not have brands. They just believe they do. The next is distribution. You're right. People spend a lot of energy on the content. But they did, they seldomly think enough about how does that content live? And we live in a very fragmented communication landscape geared by algorithms in very narrow cohorts. So one thing I will say about distribution is AI makes the unscalable scalable. You create one thing, this conversation in long form, in 3 years, the applications will be able to create very nuanced, probably more creative, 30 reiterations of this conversation, plus several blogs, plus a newsletter. So distribution, Distribution becomes ubiquitous. So you go product, it's me and you can create the same level product very quickly with the same idea. You then go distribution becomes easier. We can put it in more places. What are—

putting it in more places does not mean that it's going to reach people. Can, because there's so many more people can create so much more content so much quicker.

It, my view is that most things are mediocre. So in marketing mode, so you will, both of us will look at some thing. Most people produce rubbish, whether AI's created it, whether they've created it, it's not very good. We overestimate our ability to produce great work. So distribution, it's a story that we tell ourselves. Some large companies have so many advantages through distribution because they have legacy, network, brand, image, customers. So they have distribution advantages. What I will say is For 99% of companies on the planet, they don't have that. So we can't complain about not having distribution. We just have to go get distribution and you can buy it or you can earn it. And to buy it, anyone can do that and you need a lot of resource and capital, or you can earn it. And the only way to earn it is produce better content, produce better work. Build viral loops within your product, create features that are highly shareable. The great thing about Lovable, they're subsidizing the cost of the build over and over again deliberately, so that there's applications being sent around DMs everywhere that say Lovable. They just say Lovable everywhere. That's how they're getting their distribution through product, not because their marketing is shocking. I've seen their paid ads, they're shit at marketing. Marketing, but they're great at distribution because of product. So he's got nothing like that. That's the point here. This is marketing is so nuanced.

So you still need a good product because you can put millions in distribution and advertising, but the product, not if the product is not good enough, it won't succeed in a market where there's a better player.

Yeah, look, product, the bar is getting higher, the floor's getting raised, like expectations around good product are everybody expects a product. Does the best product with the best features always win? In most cases, no, not necessarily, unless you're elevating a category tenfold. I'll give you an example. We're currently building a business to help initially with company incorporation. So our competition right now in this business is the government. So the bar is so— and formation agents, people that do professional services.

And a couple of new banks such as Tide, for example.

Yeah, they have, they have partnerships with, but the product is still useless. Let me be very clear. I know the market as well as anyone across every formation agent as a consequence of going through this process. What I'm saying is the bar is very low. For us to create a 50x experience to what currently exists, that opportunity is there right now. Using agentic processing, using natural language. So that's what we're embarking on doing. So that's an area where product can move the market on so much. But there are many fields where product's great everywhere. There are lots of like sectors and SaaS platforms where just the bar's so high that the product creating another feature, doing it slightly better is incremental. But there are fields where you can move the needle on a a lot.

Any other fields you see possible gaps in the market right now?

Yeah, I think one of my observations of SaaS businesses, a lot of people are building agents and they're developing these very deep stacks, meaning they're adding features and this agent can do this, this, this, this, this, and this. My view is if we are all going to use agents in the next 5 years in a very material way in our professional lives, in our personal lives, This is going to introduce technology or new types of technology to a lot of people. So you need gateway products, you need narrow products. So when you look at things like making assistants, like an AI assistant, that could mean many things. What is the gateway problem that people are most likely to give up when they have an assistant?

What are they— we spoke about managing your calendar in another podcast.

Yes. So we're taking on with one of our businesses, we're in closed testing at the minute, a meeting scheduler. And the reason and the principle of this is, yes, we could go down the full productivity stack and start organizing your emails and write emails for you and, you know, clear your inbox. However, when you get an assistant for the first time, I have to build trust with that person. And technology is exactly the same. And my gateway of trust when I start is I will let someone organize my diary. I won't let them think on my behalf, and I certainly won't let them respond on my behalf. But over time, through building trust, through a delightful experience on scheduling, I can move up the value chain. So yes, I think more and more people should look at very simple problems in a very narrow sector and start there. And don't fall in love with features and don't build out the whole comprehensive stack because there are two things happening. There's a big behavioral shift in how we interface with technology. We're moving from form filling on the internet to using natural language through ChatGPT. We'll go a step further from chat interfaces to more voice. So there's all these behavioral shifts. Shifts that are happening and converging alongside technology. So you don't have to be too hasty to get to the right answer. And underpinning all of this, the technology giants and incumbents can come and wipe you out.

You could spend a year solving a problem and gaining traction and they can build it into their system in a moment and that's it. Yeah. In the next launch. That's the danger with what you said about building an AI for something or everything. OpenAI or Google can get a few engineers on it and then build it into their a core product which people already pay for, and the use case is there for the taking. 100%. Now, I'm wary of time, Oliver, and thank you so much for this, but I do have a couple more questions because you said you are a workaholic, you work all day, sometimes all night, and 7 days a week. The hustle is real, especially in the early days of a startup. Every entrepreneur I've spoken to told me about that. And to be clear, we're talking about sprints, not doing this forever. And you also admitted to being mildly dyslexic and using a range of tools such as Whisperflow and prefer speaking to writing. So I'm wondering, in this whole, in a way, madness that you are throwing yourself in because you're enjoying so much the process, how do you keep balanced and productive without burning out?

Look, I'm the worst person to ask for this. I could be burnt out as I'm answering this right now. What I will say is that I really enjoy what I do. I love the people I work work with. I get fuel from taking on difficult challenges. That's me being self-aware. That's not me preaching that everybody should behave and act the way I do. I have certain mechanisms for dealing with stress. Things tend not to stress me out at all. And these are kind of inbuilt. I work out a lot, as in—

Okay, so that's definitely one way that other people have told me through working out, it helps them release the right chemicals and be in good shape in order to be resistant and resilient to the stress and the effort that they're putting in.

Yeah. And I will tell you one way is we're all overscheduled because we're now hybrid, virtual, real world. We tend to now have a lot more meetings than we ever did in the past. And one thing that I try and do is mix up my formats. So if we had an in-person conversation, I would get fuel. I would get energy. I would love that. For some people, depending on where they are on the neurodivergent spectrum, they may, that may be draining to them. To me, I get fuel from meeting people in person. Where I don't get fuel is if I have too many virtual conversations, and I'll tell you why, because they're performative. When you're on a screen, but you don't get the connection, you're not getting the energy energy. You're not reading the signals in the same way. So what I tend to do is mix in phone calls in my day as well. So some, I'll go for a walk, take phone calls alongside, and having switching modality for phone calls, it's less, it's less performative. It's just engaging in a slightly more passive way. So mixing up phone calls alongside virtual and trying to do as many in-person things as I can, that seems to give me the fuel and energy in a really practical way. And then I also now have built some really simple tools. You mentioned Whisperflow. You really do do your research. It's a new tool I discovered and I love it. And basically I now hit my Fn key and I can speak into my laptop and fill out any typeform. So email, a WhatsApp message. I prefer to orate. I still write because I think writing is important to crystallise thoughts and memory and structure. But if I'm trying to be productive, I talk because I can get through a lot more. So that's been a real unlock for me. So besides Whisperflow, what's in your stack?

I'm assuming ChatGPT. Yes.

So my stack is ChatGPT generally for research, sometimes Perplexity. Well, that's not pro. A pro. Look, the way, the way I view it is if I can pay £200, even though it's expensive for a lot of people to have the most intelligent AI on the planet help me and give me a slight edge, I should probably pay that in the context of the many subscriptions I have that I waste money on, like, you know, it's a small price to pay in my view, but I come from a privileged position. I will call that out. Second thing. So ChatGPT, I use Claude as a writing aid. I actually find Claude does a really good job of rationalizing scripting. I have developed some really nice prompt structures for myself as a sort of writing I use Perplexity on occasion. I've started using Replit and Lovable just to test out ideas and kind of bring stuff to life. I'm getting more familiar with Figma. Designers always send me Figmas, so I'm getting a bit more familiar in moving around Figma. I'm a Notion guy, document. I use Notion Clipper to store information and log. I call it logging your knowledge base. So. Now, if you're looking for inspiration, if I see an interesting article or great piece of content that I use for inspiration, I'll log that with Notion Clipper.

A lot of people use Apple Notes for that on their phone, but Notion is next level. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's got AI integrated, so I can now find things. You know, things can be tagged. You can create tables in order very quickly. So that's been really beneficial. Very shortly this week, I'm starting to use Meetup. Meeting, which will be our meeting scheduler. So I will give that a plug and say that'll be a phenomenal aid to not go down the doom loops of, are you available? This, this, this. I would let AI do that for us. And yeah, I use Midjourney on occasion. I use Magnific as an upscaler on certain images to produce the quality. A lot of people, and I haven't used it that much, but I've used it once or twice, Higgsfield for like really cool treatments on image to video. They do some really sort of image to video.

I've not heard of that one, so I'll have to check it out.

Yeah, really cool. And yeah, my tech stack's pretty light. It takes a lot for something to— I try a lot of things, but it takes a lot to make its way onto my phone or onto my laptop.

So in terms of productivity, then, do you use— you're going to be using an AI agent and a tool from coming from the Co-Created Studios in terms of scheduling. Do you have an assistant working on your emails, or do you get any help in any other areas of your day-to-day productivity business-wise?

No, there's a belief that I have where, yes, you can outsource a lot of things that you do, but my diary is so dynamic in totality that I like to keep certain levels of control. When I speak to people, I like to speak to people. So if I'm going to engage with someone, I want to know it's me. And I also think there's a cost to giving up aspects of your role. If we suddenly all stop writing, if we suddenly all stop doing certain things because AI does it, we will lose skills. There will be an attrition, there will be a cost. So I am very cognizant of creating some friction in my life. I'm not a believer in automating everything. I need to put my own mind to use. If I prompted for everything, if I didn't do my own writing on occasion, that to me would be a problem.

There's been research in this area, and it said we get lazy and we also lose the joy of life if we use too much AI.

100%. 100%.

So, Oliver, have there been any books that you think any entrepreneur should be reading? Anything that inspired you guided you through your journey? Yeah.

So great book, um, by Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. That was enlightening, talking about the business journey, famous book, very traditional sort of VC. Again, on that same thread, Peter Thiel, Zero to One, great read. For me, a little complex in how it's articulated, but some real deep wisdom in there. Really thoughtful wisdom. There was a product, there was a book called The War of Art, which was written by Steven Pressfield. And I remember it being a short read, reading that a long time ago. And it talks about resistance and procrastination, or resistance being another word for procrastination. And it just reaffirms how many times we procrastinate. And he wrote that on the basis to help him to overcome writer's block. What was the process he went through to do that? That was really helpful for me as someone that's always switching modalities. And in business, you're always switching, switching modes and you have to be hyperproductive. Just being aware of your own procrastination is super helpful. So yeah, there are 3 books that I think a lot of people will get value out of, and there are many others.

There are so many others. I'll make sure I include them in the show notes, but I tend to ask everybody about their recommendations if they have some. Now, tapering off our discussion, something that I like to ask all my Millennial Masters interviewees interviews towards the end is, even though you said you feel privileged for being where you are and you enjoy doing what you do, Oliver, we all know that success in getting financial security to a certain point where you are now requires sacrifice. So I'm wondering, what are the biggest sacrifices you've had to do so far to be where you are today?

The biggest sacrifices, it depends, it's subjective. Um, I have a very supportive family and people around me and friendships and relationships. So the argument would be that I'm not as present as I could be. I could invest more time in my relationships. So I'm sure there's a cost. There's been a cost to me. However, you know, I'm not going to dwell on it. It's the price of entry. So it is what it is.

And if there is going to be one piece of advice for anybody looking at becoming an entrepreneur in the new digital era and in what's coming up? What's the next best thing that they should do?

Good question. The next best thing in the next era. I think the best foundation for any entrepreneur, and I genuinely believe this, is self-belief and raising your aspirations. And it seems like a Fugazi thing if I said to you, believe in something you don't, very hard, very hard to do. But I think belief is self-fulfilling. I think optimism is self-fulfilling. You're going to receive a lot of nos. You're going to face friction. You're going to face challenges. I think just having that mindset or trying to draw on something to allow you to have belief and raise your aspirations, I think will serve you better than any tangible advice I give you. Meaning if I say go after this thing or do this one thing or do— I don't think there's anything else that anyone could take from this conversation that would do more for their life if they could figure that out.

Well, that's, that's a great idea to wrap up this chat today. Believe in yourself no matter what and be optimistic about your chances. Thank you so much, Oliver, for coming on Middle Millennial Masters, sharing your journey and your wisdom so far. And I'm gonna make sure that people are gonna get all the co-created links in the show notes and follow all the up-and-coming businesses from your Venture Studio. Wonderful.

And thank you, Daniel Ionescu. You were super well prepared. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you. Thanks, Oliver.

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