E14: From Pilot to CEO: 9 Lessons from Building a Fast-Growing Startup with Derek Feebrey | CEO Trensdspek

Welcome to the Switchgear Show. This is your host, Pri Saka, and today I'm thrilled because we have Derek Febry with us. Derek, thank you for joining me.

Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Pri.

Fantastic. So let me introduce Derek. Derek is the CEO and co-founder of TrendSpec along with Fiona Church and Mitch Deem, and they are a rapidly growing technology company that provides precision reality twin technology, which helps property and infrastructure companies manage their high-value assets. Last November, Trendspek raised $6.3 million in its Series A round, which was led by Tronca Ventures. And I happen to know the founders and the leaders within this business, and it is an amazing company. So we're going to jump right in and figure out the secret sauce behind the story. So Derek has an amazing story. He's a high flyer. So Derek, tell us a little bit more about your genesis story and how you got here.

Yeah, as Pri mentioned, I'm one of 3 co-founders with Fiona and Mitch, and the 3 of us have lived together, worked together, known each other for 2 decades now. And the 3 of us actually started together all as pilots, bush pilots to start with, and we flew out of the Northern Territory. Ultimately, we all ended up in the airlines, myself spending 10 years flying internationally, flying 747s, and then into domestic Boeing 737s, domestic across Australia towards the end of my career, where I was left in the position that the business, it deserved all the attention. It was growing and scaling. I actually left flying right before COVID. So right at the end of 2019, start of 2020, I actually left, not knowing that after a few months later, it probably would've been a lot easier. But yeah, it was a really good career foundation.

So how has that fueled the transition into imagining a platform where people can manage, inspectors can manage these high-value assets? How did that come about?

Yeah. So 10 years ago, the 3 of us founded our first venture together, which was Hoverscape. It was one of the first drone service-based companies in Australia. And you can imagine a decade ago, it wasn't something you'd go and buy off the shelf. They were custom made with all sorts of parts and bits and pieces.

Right.

And believe it or not, back then you actually needed a pilot's license to fly one commercially. So the same regulator that regulates Qantas and Virgin were the same ones that were regulating our industry in the drone services. It's come a long way since then. But because the 3 of us are quite technical people, we naturally gravitated into asset inspections.

Yeah.

And we had a mission then to revolutionize the industry that relied on ropes and cherry pickers and everything like that and use technology to help. support that. But quickly, what we learned over that period was while it was one thing to keep people safe on the ground and use technology as drones, the actual outcome hadn't changed. The only difference was we're now handing over USB sticks, like with thousands of images or video. And ultimately that just ended up in the same written type PDF report that owners were basing all of their decisions on. So the data became unmanageable and it didn't make it any easier to take action on. So being problem solvers by nature, especially in that career of aviation, it's just you solve one problem and you get to the next problem, you solve that one, was what led us to Trying to find a better solution to actually make all of this data actionable. And we never had the intent to go and become a software company. It was, we actually did a global search and tried everything remotely we thought could potentially even fit. And when we just couldn't find anything, we were left in that position. Do we wait or do we go and build it ourselves? And for us, it wasn't even really a thought. It was just like, This is the challenge. This is, we've got to solve it. And that's what led to the birth of TrendSpec. And then, so in 2018, we actually made the jump and started building it, and it just kept growing and growing from there.

Wow. And I think as we look backwards from where you are today and the journey that you're on, you've, I think you've worn so many different hats as you do as a founder. Tell me a little bit more about What are the different hats that you've had to put on and have enjoyed, and perhaps some which have been challenging as well?

For us, there's been, it's been every hat. It's sales, marketing, operations, legal, tax, finance, the technical components, not, and not having come from any of that background, everything's been a learning curve. The 3 of us really have complemented each other really nicely in that regard. But you're right, looking back, it's just being open to learn and leveraging other people's experience. You don't have to do everything yourself. We've had, we've brought in people with expertise in that area and we leverage that expertise. We've brought in people to support, like contractors and consultants to help support on different areas.

Yeah.

Just looking back on, I'll give you an example. Like we, we spent majority of our actual career in as airline pilots. If there's ever an event in a situation, it's not, or very much in Australia, it's not a captain's decision. Captain is there to leverage thoughts from everyone in that cockpit, cuz it could be like 4, 5, 6 pilots sometimes.

Yeah.

Leverage the team. And then ultimately you're getting different perspectives. Then you can actually make a decision. Then you then stop, review, pivot. It's like test and adjust the whole way through. It's always been a challenge, but you just have to be open to continuing the learning and we'll never stop learning. And that's what makes this so fun. There's always something new to learn, always something better, always something different to be better at. Yep.

Yeah, that sounds really good. And I think that what comes out very clearly from when I happen to know a number of your team members is that not only have you been pioneers and innovators, you've also been learners, you've been problem solvers, and you've also been people who are leveraging the best that you have in the people around you. And that creates a certain kind of culture. When I speak to people about TrendSpec, the number one thing that I hear about is that it is a great place to work. It is genuinely about the people, and people love working at TrendSpec. What, how have you gone about creating a culture that draws people in? Because I will say this, having worked with lots of startups and lots of founders, that is not typical. Often startups can burn and churn through people a lot faster than they'd like to admit. So you're doing something right. So tell me a little bit bit more about culture.

Culture for us is really important. What we look for is people that firstly, non-egotistical. They won't know everything. They've got people around them to help support them. We're always looking for someone who's looking to get the best out of themselves and helping others within our team to get the best out of themselves. So We're very non-egotistical when we're looking at, also when we're looking at hiring, we hire people for a particular reason. We don't hire just to place gaps and sit in here, you do this and do it this way. We bring in, and it doesn't matter if it's salespeople who have their own ideas and their own ways that they want to do it, marketing.

Yeah.

The same. We, we more empower people, especially as founders. We're not here to do their jobs. We're not good at their jobs. We know we need an outcome, but we're bringing them in to use their experience and their ideas and their creativity to help us get to that point. So that's how we foster our culture. And you'll see that. We'll have, say, any type of meeting we'll have, we'll be talking about something around sales process, for example. And even our development team will pipe in and go, oh, what about, have you thought it was maybe something like this? So it's that type of culture where people can have their ideas and ultimately you get the best outcome after all, when people can bring up things that not necessarily anyone's thought of and come from a different perspective.

And the very fact that you mentioned that someone from the development team would pipe up and say something says so much, that they feel comfortable that they can have an opinion and someone's going to listen to it. I think that's terrific. That's great. Now, one of the things that you mentioned when I met you the first time, and you talked about values, and values were important. Tell me a little bit more about how do you integrate values into the workplace?

Yeah, see, that's the big one. How we integrated them to start with was this was a group exercise. We didn't set them. We all got together as a team and we spent the whole day just doing that, who we are as a company, because we know that going forward, the bigger and bigger we get, the harder and harder it becomes. So how do we protect the culture that we've built? So this was a whole team exercise and everyone had a say. And it's funny because at the end of the day, when you're pulling all the ideas together, it came down to very common threads and themes. Some of our values as a company is firstly, we have to have humility.

Mm-hmm.

Our team, we put egos aside. We listen to everyone's perspective equally. And then actually the big thing, and I'll tell you, this is very much an aviation thing as well. You never blame, get blamed for mistakes ever. And no one hides anything. If they make a mistake, that's a good thing because that's what we learn from. And that's how we get better. So having humility, no ego, learning from our mistakes, not being, not trying to hide them. That was a really big cultural, that's one of our key values. The other one was, it is, we are a group of hungry people. So Transpec's really built off a vision that we have. We're not trying to follow anyone else. We're learning from clients, we're learning from their workflows, and that's our focus. So being hungry to learn and grow was a really big value for our team and always being wanting to be motivated to achieve and to grow something bigger than ourselves, which tied into that humility piece. The other one was We're empathetic. The really big common theme for us was that we listen without making any assumptions because ultimately we're just trying to solve a problem and provide simple, accessible answers to those problems for not only our own team, but for our clients as well. So that was the other big one. And then we had 2 other keys, which was Integrity. So, we do the right thing at the right time and we take responsibility. And then the big one was we are united and that's we have fun together. Everyone in our team will go out for drinks together. They'll go out for dinner. They'll plan their social activities. So, those type of values that we brought in is something we try and promote and keep and We know that's going to be a challenge the bigger and bigger we get, but we don't accept anything less. And I think trying to identify that as we grow, especially as early as we can, is how we're going to try and have to protect that going forward.

Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. And it's really inspirational, more so because I have the advantage of knowing a number of people on your team because they actually live the values. A lot of people talk about values. I think You've done a great job. You clearly, whether you're talking about humility, whether it's about hunger and empathy, it really comes through in how you engage people from the very first conversation. Anyone who's interviewed at TrendSpec has come back and said that it's been a great experience. The role may or may not be right for them. And so even if you've hired 1 from 5 people that you met. Everyone's actually had a good experience. There are— and I think that comes through where you end up drawing people to yourself. One of the things that I see consistently is that all stress, frustration, and bottlenecks in teams usually comes down to a clash in values. So values friction is one of those things can really drag a team down or slow a team down. How have you addressed that? What is your view of dealing with challenges internally, which are a potential clash in values?

So values between bottlenecks in process?

That's the question?

Yes.

I think that, yes, most of the issues that you end up finding within teams is usually because there's a difference in values or how people are operating. They're not united. Let's put it that way sometimes. So how do you deal with that?

This comes back to having those strong values of humility and being open to other people's perspectives. So, an example now, we, in terms of bottlenecks within the company, like we're a growing company, so we're always, we're like firefighters essentially. We go from one bottleneck, solve that one, move to the next one. But we ultimately do that by empowering everyone.

So.

Yeah. There's process that can get stuck and there's things that we do, but where we have that cultural part is like, why are we doing them? Is it answering a question that we have? And ultimately every process is just doing it to answer a question. And is that question valid? Is this doing anything or are we just doing it for the sake of doing it? We're in This scale-up phase where we've stopped and we've looked at what we're doing across the board and systems and things that we do in marketing don't work well with sales, don't work well with customer success. So we just let them go. Sales need questions from marketing, marketing need questions from sales, success needs questions or needs answers from everyone. So they work together just to work out what that question actually is, what the 3 options could be, what's the best option going forward, and does that give us the answer that to the question we're asking? But it's, it works well culturally when everyone is open to change, open to being, doing something better, who are quite hungry to improve. And as founders, we step out of that. That's, we bring in people to lead marketing and to lead sales and to lead success and those areas of the business. We brought them in for their experience. We're just here to enable them, give them what they need to be better. We look at our, even our development team, like they're good. So we got out of their way.

Yeah.

And we've just gone through this 2-year rebuild and actually taken the time. And that was led by them because they've come from other software companies and big software companies, the ones that are getting up towards being unicorns, where their house of cards were starting to crumble because they never took the time. They just kept adding and building and adding and building.

Hmm.

To where it was all falling apart and no one, it was very founder-led, those type of companies. And they were scared that unless we stop, re-architect with the future in mind so that it can scale without all of the problems that they've seen, that's what they wanted to do. That's their expertise. They were confident that it was going to set us up for the future. We're not here to say no. So we use that expertise and then you get the friction between, and then you actually do get friction between sales trying to build new things and dev trying to re-engineer. But where we had that underlying culture, everyone understood this was actually for the greater good. So it never gets to that point, that boiling point where— It can become where all the big friction can start to generate. So yeah, having those underlying, that underlying values and culture is what prevents all of those big boiling points from coming out.

That is so good. I firsthand have had the opportunity to see technical and commercial teams at a big level pull apart. And it is very detrimental to the same mission that they're trying to achieve, the same direction that they're trying to go. But because there've been deep, deeper rifts between dev versus sales or the whole commercial side of the house, it's been very— I have to— the other thing that I must call out, I absolutely loved, and it's refreshing to hear you say that. You bring that from aviation, which is if you've made a mistake, it's a good thing. To call it out so that you can learn from it. Because that is not how I'd say 8 out of 10 people think. But it is tremendous that you have— you can create a safe place. If you can create a safe environment where people feel emotionally safe to say, I've made a mistake, or put their hand up. Congratulations on doing that.

Well, it makes everyone—

Yeah, go ahead.

I was just thinking it makes everyone excited because, and I think this is what I commend our whole team for, is when, and let's not even call them mistakes, let's call them learnings. If we do something and it doesn't work, that's not a mistake, but if, and we don't stick around and dwell on it. And get upset about it and everything because identifying, okay, this didn't work, this, or this was a mistake. This is what we've learned. I'm excited again because we've identified that and we can now be better. And then one of the things that especially I do personally is the end of each week. So on a Friday, the only thing I look at is Are we a better company than we were last Friday? And if we are, that's an achievement because it's just step by step. We have our long-term goals, but really it's, we just get to the next day and then we get to the next day.

Yeah.

And if each day we're a little bit better, then over a long period of time, we become really good.

And that's such a good way to look at it. Because for those, obviously, the listeners were not on this conversation before we started the show, so as to speak. But I asked you how your week was, and your response was it was an epic week, right? There's so many people who'd just be happy it's Friday, and you've come to the end of the week. But you've— that response just energized me listening to you. Because it's, again, it's all about perspective. And if you have your eyes on progress and what's working, I think that I can just imagine how that flows through the rest of the team.

Yep. Yeah. And we were talking about it before, and for us this week, we did a big retrospective on the last 12 months and what we've learned, what we've done right, what we haven't done. And out of that, so many different learnings, and there's an action list as long as you can imagine. It's huge. But that doesn't faze us because we just, okay. We've identified things that we can do better. We've got them in a list. It's a daunting list. It's always going to be a daunting list. And that doesn't matter if it's sales or development or anything like that, but just the fact that the list is there, we'll just chip away at it one by one. And we'll probably get through a part of it and we'll do another retrospective and have a whole different list. And then one by one, we'll get through it.

As we wrap up this conversation, I think you've Really given us a great perspective on how much of a people company you are first, then a technology company. And you're very people-centric. You've talked about letting leaders lead. You've done your 1-year retrospective. Now, as you look ahead, what are some of the things that are important to you as a people company that you want to magnify and build?

So, for us, it's everyone just developing how we work. So, that's the big thing that came out of it. Information sharing and how we transfer information amongst the company, not just siloed type of information, but more across company level.

Yeah.

So, everyone has a really good understanding of what everybody's doing and How we're driving towards that mission, how we're tracking what we can do better. But what you say is what we live by. So we're people-centric internally and we're people-centric externally. So the thing that I'm most proud of is when I get to talk to a lot of our clients. And that's their common feedback is that we're known as a people company, not as a software company.

Amazing.

We have access. They know to call, or they've got somebody on the end of the phone who, and it might be someone to support them on how they can better fly their drone internally, or it might be how they can better process information. They've got ideas. They talk with Josh and our product team who will work with them and develop wireframes and what if it worked like this? And they all have. So the same culture that we've built internally with everyone being free to talk, we've built that with our clients. Because ultimately that's why we're here. We started to help make their lives better. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if we work a lot in big property portfolios and infrastructure portfolios and big Derek, I love the clarity that you have and the culture that you have built within your team and how you solve problems for clients and customers.

So I know you're going to be very successful with what you are doing, and it's been inspirational. Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with me today.

That's a pleasure, Pri. Pleasure.