Dean McEvoy on egos and startups

0:00 Adam Spencer: Let me tell you about our partner, Teamified. If you need to build a top-notch team quickly, Teamified is your go-to solution. They not only provide fractional CTOs, they can also do contractors and even remote team members tailored exactly to your needs. And whether you're looking for expertise in the Philippines, India, or Sri Lanka, Teamified has you covered. What's amazing is that Teamified uses a blend of AI and human expertise to cut hiring times by 50%, cent. Their platform handles everything from automated onboarding to day-to-day management and even performance tracking. You can also handle rewards and recognition, buy equipment, and order training all through their platform. Simplify your hiring process and get the best talent fast with Teamified. Check them out now and transform your team. Go to dayone.fm/teamified. That's dayone.fm/teamified. T-E-A-M-I-F-I-E-D, and get started today. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development, but a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you, NTP, for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development, but a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you, NTP, for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer and welcome to Day One, the podcast that spotlights Australian startups, founders, and the organizations that empower Australian entrepreneurship. We go back to the beginning to tell the story of Australia's most inspiring founders and how they built their companies. You're listening to a special interview series as part of a documentary W2D1 is producing about the history of the Australian startup ecosystem. On the episode today, we have—

3:18 Dean McEcoy: G'day, my name is Dean McAvoy. I'm a serial founder, I guess you say now, investor and startup advisor. I guess what I do every day now these days is I try and find the greatest companies in the world that are trying to change it and have a big impact, and I try and be part of it in any way I can. So whether that be as an investor, as an advisor working on product-led growth and marketing, or, you know, just coaching the founders because I've been through a lot of the ups and downs of being a startup founder and it's a rocky journey and I love helping people be successful.

3:50 Adam Spencer: When would you say you first got involved in the Australian startup ecosystem?

3:56 Dean McEcoy: Back when there wasn't really an ecosystem. 10 guys that used to catch up occasionally for a beer. So my first foray into the startup world was actually from owning a bar and restaurant where I came up with an idea for online reservations, and that was called Booking Angel. And then, you know, I started this tech startup. I'd had some experience with technology in the background. I'd worked for a technology company prior to owning a bar. And so just jumped in with no idea, and I made all the stupid mistakes that every single founder could possibly imagine. Like, if there's a list of all the dumb things founders should do, I did all of them. So I got started in the beginning back then, and it was probably like 10 to 15 people at these meetups.

4:33 Adam Spencer: What year are we talking?

4:35 Dean McEcoy: 2003 was when I first started the business, but I probably didn't start looking around to try and find people until 2004, I think.

4:42 Adam Spencer: So you say it was a bar. Was that the same thing as the Booking Angel?

4:48 Dean McEcoy: Yeah, correct. I owned a bar in Glebe called the Roxbury. I came up with an idea while I was there for a better way to receive online reservations. So this is a time when, you know, no fast internet. We used to have to use the EFTPOS terminal phone line to get onto the internet so people couldn't ring up credit cards when the internet was connected. I used to miss reservations that came in via email and it kind of annoyed me. People would turn up for the restaurant and the place would be double booked and I was like, wouldn't it be easier if they booked online but phoned me and just told me that there was a reservation coming? Back then I built this speech recognition system so you would book online, it would automatically convert it to a voice message, it would call the restaurant and it would read out the reservation like, "Hi, Adam wants to make a reservation on Saturday for 4 people at 8 PM. Push 1 to accept it, push 2 to reject it, or push 3 to talk to him," and it would connect you on the phone straight away. So it was pretty rudimentary but it worked really well and we got a lot of traction.

5:46 Adam Spencer: That's an important part because I've heard people talk in the past about the early days and how it was just a few people catching up. Having a beer, and that was the community. Were they meeting up at your bar?

5:58 Dean McEcoy: No, this is pre— I wish I'd owned the bar then, but I think the earliest memory I remember of catching up was with, you know, Mick Labinskis and Marty Wells. They used to put on this night called Stir, and you would catch up with a bunch of other geeky people like us who were doing weird stuff. Mike Cannon-Brookes turned up one time. I think Scott Farquhar turned up another time. And you just caught up for beers, but sometimes they played these like weird games. I remember one game particularly where you threw random words and put them up on two whiteboards, and it was like banana and truck, and then randomly you picked two names out of the hat, you split into teams, you had to come up with a business based upon those two names. So you were like, we're Banana Truck, and we're like, we're a fruit delivery service, and you had to get up and do the pitch at the end, and whoever gave the best pitch, I mean, you know, won free beers at the bar or something. So, you know, there was some educational component and sharing component, but probably sitting around a table with a bunch of entrepreneurs now that are worth billions.

6:55 Adam Spencer: What were the events that happened between ending Booking Angel and getting started with Spreets? Was that one thing straight into the other?

7:02 Dean McEcoy: No, it's a good story. So I was in Australia from 2004. I tried to raise money from investors. I got every government grant you could get to try and start businesses. I was told you had to you know, have IP in order to get these grants. It was back when the government didn't understand what we were doing. And so I thought, I'm gonna go and be successful with this, so I'm gonna move to Silicon Valley. So I jumped on a plane in 2007 and flew over there and met a bunch of people. So there was a few Aussies that had moved over there. Again, Nick Lubinskis and Marty Wells are two that come to mind. There's another great community that kind of built over there. So obviously you land in Silicon Valley, catch up with all these Aussies, And straight away you get leveled up. You learn really at that time back in 2007, you know, it was like the difference between going into kindergarten and university in terms of the knowledge and the learning and the way of doing things, the acceleration. And so just being there, you immerse yourself in that. I got more proficient at pitching and understanding what it took to be successful. I took feedback. I went and pitched like some of the most successful investors in the world. At the time, like Mike Moritz from Sequoia answered my email and spoke to me, and Aden Senkwood, who's one of the best angel investors in the world now, I think he was an early investor in Canva too. Felicia Stentches, heaps of people like that, that took the time, gave you the feedback. If anything, Americans were probably too nice, and Australians are too underselling of what they're doing. We tend to just be like, yeah, I'm this Aussie doing this kind of thing, which is cool, and we don't sell what we do. And in America, you've really got to sell who you are and why you're important, why people should listen to you. Otherwise people don't. And the Americans are lovely, but they never really gave you that direct feedback about what was wrong with your business. I think they were either too polite or hoping one day that if you were successful, you might come back to them. And so, it was many years I wasted there. Not wasted there, I really upskilled 2007 to 2009. And then I got a phone call one day from my mom saying that my grandfather had passed away. And I was very close to him, he was a fantastic man, and I wanted to fly home for the funeral. Mm-hmm. But I only had $900 left in my bank account and I was like, this is the end of my business 'cause I don't even have enough for a flight back. So I jumped on the plane. Ironically, on the flight on the way home, I stopped via LA and I've been trying to close this deal with a big US company for booking agent where they would pay me to use the reservation software and they finally closed it and I stopped via LA on the way home to sign the contract, grabbed the contract, got on the plane home. Mm-hmm. Came back to Australia broke, and at 32 years old, came home to my grandfather's funeral, which was pretty terrible and sad, but also sad 'cause I knew it was the death of my business. But I had this contract, and so I was like, I've got a piece of paper here that says I'll get paid for every reservation that's made on their website. I just need to get it live on their website. And so I went and spoke to Phil and Mick at Pollinizer and said, "Hey, I've got this deal, you know, what do you reckon you guys do the tech on it and we'll split some money?" I think we did an equity deal or something in Booking Angel. And so they agreed and I was working out of their office. So I used to get up from mum and dad's place in the morning at 32 and catch the train into Surry Hills where they were. And it was pretty depressing to be honest, like feeling like a failure like that. And then eventually got in there and it was at the Christmas party for Pollinizer where I started to plant the seed with Phil and I was like, look Phil, while I was over in Silicon Valley, I pitched this investor, a guy called Kevin Hartz, who's the founder of Eventbrite, very smart guy, and he took a liking to me and mentored me a little bit, I'd say. But he said to me, you know, like, Dean, you know, why isn't Booking Angel successful? You've been at this for 5 years now. You're a smart guy, you could be off getting a job somewhere else. Why are you still doing this? And then I was like, why isn't Booking Angel successful? And I articulated to him, I said, well, I'll tell you why it is successful and it's starting to work better, 'cause I was always pitching. And I said to him, it's because we finally worked out a formula where if a restaurant signs up today, I can deliver reservations tomorrow. And we used to do that by running special offers on our partner websites that drove reservations quickly. And we knew that's what created momentum. And I told him this story and he was like, Oh wow, that's pretty similar to this new website I just saw go live called Groupon. So he tipped me on to the Groupon model before they even had any traction. They weren't popular at all. And I was like, wow, that's a much better way of doing what I'm doing, like collect the money rather than— so I saw the model and I was talking to Phil about it at this Christmas party in December of 2009 and I was like, Phil, I saw this amazing thing, it's really good traction, early days, it's growing but it looks pretty good. Ah. And he was interested. He was like, "I'll tell you what, we've got a little bit of resources available over Christmas," because they had some development that was done in India, and I think a lot of them didn't take the time off over Christmas that we did. They were like, "Look, we've got a bit of capacity." He said, "If we launch it in February and if it's not working by Easter, we'll shut it down." I was like, "Good deal." So they agreed to build the product, which was the first version of Spreeds. And so that was the beginning of it. It took them 32 working days to build the product. I just got on the phone and started calling businesses and trying to convince them to do deals and annoyed everyone in the office because I was just on the phone all day trying to close deals. I convinced a good mate of mine who now runs a website called Wazact, which is a payments platform. He was also just in between things at the moment, so I got him in. I used to have to go and withdraw cash every day from the ATM because he knew how skint I was and he's like, I don't believe you're going to pay me, so— I'd go and get cash out of the ATM every day after him helping me doing some sales. He's a great guy, still is, good friends with him. James Goodrich, his name is. And so, from there it grew. The first version of Spreets launched on my birthday, which was the 4th of February, 2009. We all celebrated and had drinks that night. It was a great affair. Actually, funny story from that night. The whole idea of Spreets was about selling vouchers, right? It's about selling discount vouchers to people. So we're sitting down there celebrating, "Oh, we launched a website." There's people who bought $4,000 worth of stuff who were super happy. Yeah. And we were celebrating in the restaurant that was doing the deal because it was downstairs, and everyone was like cheering and high-fiving, and all of a sudden I went, "I don't remember seeing a design for a voucher. Who did that? Did anyone do that?" I'm like, "No." So basically we designed a voucher business, taken the money, but we hadn't worked out a way to send vouchers for people. So 4 or 5 beers in, we all ran upstairs, quickly exported the CSV file and merged it into Mail Merge and just made fake vouchers that put random numbers on the bottom that didn't really mean anything. So version 1 of Spreeds was very rushed, and I guess the lesson for people is if you're not ashamed of the first version, you're waiting too long to launch things. So we certainly lived by that rule on day one.

13:50 Adam Spencer: Are you able to talk a little bit about when you went over to the US, that Aussie community that was over there? Because I've heard this term, the Aussie Mafia, and I think that's a great anecdote there.

14:00 Dean McEcoy: Yeah, so the Aussie Mafia came from a drinks that myself, Martin Wells, Alistair Faulkner, who's one of the founders of ThreatMetrix, sold for $1 billion, and I think a Kiwi guy called Steven Weir, and maybe Bartier Hausmann, who sold his company Business Catalyst. We're all sitting around talking about how it sucks when you go and pitch to investors and there's the PayPal Mafia, and everyone's like— They're members of the PayPal Mafia and that immediately gives them like street cred and they write, millions of dollars of checks for them. And I was like, we've gotta create our own Aussie mafia. So I registered AussieMafia.com, still got the domain name. It was just an idea of that we could band together and build a reputation for Aussies in the Valley that sort of sets us apart. And I think there is a thing actually now, there's a guy called Paul Ting who wrote a really good blog post that there's a real problem Aussies when they land in the US is that they undersell themselves. The thing that happens when people have worked with Aussies for a while is that what that means is actually they overdeliver. And so he said it would be beautiful if we could sell that as our brand. Yeah, sure, we undersell. We're not like Americans. We don't go in and say, I'm going to change the world, I'm going to be number one, I'm going to be the best. We do undersell ourselves, and maybe we need to learn how to sell ourselves a bit better, but that just means we overdeliver. So when we say we do something, we do. And I think That tenacity of the Australian spirit is very true of the startups we've started. If you look at the Atlassians and the like that started on very little capital but still grew very big, that is that ability to overdeliver. We punch harder than anyone in sport and we punch harder than anyone in startups. And I think there's a balance of learning to pitch ourselves better versus just being who we are and knowing that we are a sort of group of people that overdeliver. But yeah, there's a great community in the Valley and it's just got bigger and bigger. There's a lot of really successful people that have gone over there either learnt the ropes by working for one of the big companies over there and come back and started them here, or have gone over there with their startups to try and be successful and just learned a lot and become better founders and better business people.

16:06 Adam Spencer: Did you know that you wanted to sell Spreeds when you started it?

16:10 Dean McEcoy: I don't think that was ever the intention. I'm pretty goal-orientated. I did go back and look at the first email I sent Phil, and I said, hey mate, I reckon we should build this Groupon thing. Here's the plan. We'll launch it in February. We'll sell it to Census or some Yellow Pages company for $30 million. So I underestimated it. Next year, and then we'll enjoy the spoils. So it was a joke. It was a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. But you know, the power of writing goals down, I think I do believe in that. And so maybe in some subconscious way it was manifested or focused on that. The reality of everyone goes, "Oh, did you just go and see something in Groupon and copy it and come here and sell it?" And on the outside, I can understand why people might think that. The reality is I've spent my whole life solving the same problem. And this is what's an important thread to look for in successful founders of the future because my family owned bars and restaurants and the biggest problem we had was getting bums on seats. So what did I do? I started a company that helped get bums on seats. Mm-hmm. And the reason why I was driven to do that is because it fundamentally caused huge problems in my family when we couldn't. It was my dad's entire life savings on the line in this venue that at any moment could fall over if we didn't get enough bums on seats. So I was inherently motivated at an intrinsic level to solve this problem. And if you look at Spreets, it was initially a much more efficient way to get bums on seats. What's the business I started after that? Icon Park. It's a way to get bums on seats for restaurants and help the landlords. So I'm intrinsically driven to solve this problem. Spreeds was really just an extension of that. I've been A/B testing my way to the group buying model over 5 years by accident. Just by following what the market told me, I'd actually got to the same model. And so it was more a function of I've been doing the same thing for 5 years. I even tried to raise money as Booking Angel but for a group buying thing. And everyone was like, Dean, you've been doing this for so long, give up, dude. Like, you know, just stop trying to flog a dead horse. And so I kind of did and was like, alright, we'll start again and wipe the slate clean and start a new company. And that was the beginning of that.

18:17 Adam Spencer: After you exited Spreeds, the idea was always to start another company and that was IconPark. Was that the case?

18:24 Dean McEcoy: I think this is something I'm going through at the moment because I'm starting to get that itch to start another company. And I think I am so driven to solve this problem that it's still a problem that interests me and I keep getting drawn back to it. I don't know why, it's annoying. I should get into therapy about it or something. The intention was just to solve the problem as well as I could for Spritz. And we did that. We executed, we grew like crazy. It launched on February 4th, 2010, and by September it was doing $1 million a week. And we sold it for $40 million in January 2010. That just happened because we started getting offers from people. And I was like, should we hire somebody to deal with these offers? Because it's distracting. So then we hired someone who did the M&A process and they're like, we're gonna pay you cash and do the deal now. And I was like, I saw the sale to Yahoo as an opportunity to win. So, we knew Groupon was coming hard. We knew it was a race for eyeballs. We thought partnering with the biggest media company in Australia was a good option and the deal was good. It was not so much as a function of let's get in and get out and make some money, the hit and run. Everyone thinks I'm some sort of financial genius for being able to do that. The reality is I was following what I thought was best for the company.

19:36 Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.

19:36 Dean McEcoy: And turns out it was a good decision to sell, but maybe not so good for the company. There's a lot of reasons like that culture. I think big companies, when they acquire small companies, the big culture eats the small culture and you've really got to be careful of how you look after it. But so the intention wasn't to sell. And then when I took a year off, roughly, maybe a year and a half just to recharge because it's very intense growing a company and Went from 0 to 80 people by the time we sold and hiring all those people and doing all that stuff, it was hectic. So I took some time off and then bought a bar, bought a building that had a bar and restaurant in it and started to look at the problems in the real estate industry and I was like, well, if I'm a landlord and I want to pick a good tenant, how do I do that? And the current status quo was you put an ad online, any random person emails you and says, I want to lease it. Here's my bond and I'm going to start a Swedish meatballs place. And you're like, how do you even know Swedish meatballs is going to be a good idea here? And I was looking at crowdfunding and ways to market test data. I was like, what if there's a way to like test the idea quickly and, and wouldn't that produce a better result? And then I saw that if you get an extra $500 a week in rent, it increases the value of your building by roughly about half a million dollars. So the incentives are aligned. If I can get a better tenant who pays me a little bit more because they're more successful, I can increase the value of my property.

21:00 Adam Spencer: That's a pretty interesting idea. Yeah.

21:01 Dean McEcoy: And so we played with that, it worked super, super well. I think the first week of Spreets we did $4,000. The first week of Icon Park, $40,000. We raised $281,000 in 21 days for a restaurant concept that didn't exist. So it was cool and it was fun to watch and engineering that kind of lightning strike of a marketing situation is always very interesting.

21:25 Adam Spencer: When did the idea for Tech come into your mind?

21:34 Dean McEcoy: We'd been collectively catching up with a lot of people saying, you know, we'd have these little meetups and people would talk about we need to get more organized. Mick Labinskas and I, I think it was in the year between when I finished Spreets and started, we tried to get this thing called the Endeavor Institute started. We were trying to get a bunch of people to chuck in $10,000 to pay Mick to run this thing for a while. And we just couldn't find people who were interested enough in organizing the ecosystem better. I think the problem with entrepreneurs, they were all off, you know, running and doing their own thing. And it was just a few worlds that collided at the one time. Number one was we were a bit more organized. We had a few tech meetup groups that were sort of, had some good people involved with them that were interested in seeing some change. You know, Malcolm Turnbull had come into power and I think there was a little bit of hope that there was someone who knew something about tech in government and that maybe spending the effort to talk to them would provide an ROI. Unfortunately, he didn't hang around that long, but at the time that was part of the motivation. And then UTS were very supportive financially, so they wanted to build something in the startup ecosystem, and so they had a role that someone approached me about, and I said to them, "Hey, rather than spend the money on me as a role, why don't you put the money into this organization?" And so I sort of convinced them to fund the first 2 years, which got Tech Sydney up and running. And effectively what I did then is I went around and just said, hey, what are the biggest problems we can focus on? And I just talked to founders, did customer development on the startup industry, you know, what's the biggest problems we can solve around talent? At the time it was around, I'd experienced being in Silicon Valley and the value of density, like when you've got a lot of people close to each other and you bump into people and there's parties and you talk to someone and that serendipitous kind of connection was so valuable and it's really hard to sell how valuable that is people, but I knew that having density of people in one location was important. Connection to experts, so people who knew what they're doing, who could just kick you out of a rut so you didn't hit the wall and you didn't get bad advice. There's a lot of bad advisors floating around back then, like people who thought they knew what they were talking about and didn't. And then the other problem we had was like whenever government wanted to do something, there's 100 different voices and they're like, "We just need someone to collate all this together for us." So we saw that as the initial focus of Tech Sydney and we built some products that did some things. So— Yeah. I guess the most meaningful things we did was around density. So we were pretty central in talking to state government about the startup hub. We collated a lot of the different coworking spaces together to pitch it to them that it was a good idea, that get everyone on the one page rather than have 10 different people with their own agendas. We tried to speak as one voice. Liaised with some really good people in government and found a few people who are really beneficial in supporting it. And then with the success of that, a guy called Brent Harmon who worked for Atlassian, he was the head of real estate. Him and I got together one day for a coffee and he was like, "Atlassian's running out of space. We're looking to lease space." He goes, "What if we built space? Like, that could be cool." And so it was really him that drove internally at Atlassian the idea of the bigger precinct, the Tech Central precinct. And so him, myself, and Scott Farquhar and a couple others, Annie Parker, who is at Microsoft now, but she was at Fishburners at the time, went and pitched Gladys and said, "Hey, Startup Hubs worked. What if we could make the equivalent of like an opera house for Sydney? Let's make a central precinct where it could be bigger and better." And she was all in. And I thought at the time, I thought, "Man, the property developer people are just going to come and eat our lunch. It's going to get shot down." But to the credit of the people involved since then, so I was involved in the beginning for the first year, pulling people in and getting people excited about it. And then it's happened. So the people that have followed through on it have done a really good job. job. And it's pretty encouraging to see that, you know, Glada should be very proud of that as her legacy. She's a great lady. So I forgot the question now, was around what is Tech Sydney about? So I think a lot of the problems that we had back then are a little bit solved now. So we're trying to work out what to do with Tech Sydney. We've got the Tech Council now, which is really good at liaising with government. We did a lot of other initiatives like a founder forum where other founders got together with other founders. The challenge I've had is that running a not-for-profit sucks and I don't advise anyone to ever do it ever again. It's because especially when COVID hit, everyone's got 20 other priorities now. At a minimum, Tech Sydney will keep the website up, we'll keep it going, but what it does in the future, I guess we'll wait and see where there's a problem to solve and go focus on it. Otherwise, it'll just be a website where we have a list of all the startups in Sydney and you can connect with them and do that. And hey, that's enough. You know, Startmate's probably the best example of the best advice you can get to start a business in Australia. I still don't think it's at the level of the people that I met when I was in the Valley. So I still think there are certain people in Australia who operate at that level, but they're not tending to be the ones that are out there giving advice back to founders. I think the one criticism I'd have of Startmate at the moment is we're too soft on people. I think we need to crack the whip a little.

26:32 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

26:33 Dean McEcoy: Harder at a higher level. And I can be a bit of a hard-ass as well, so I think Michael and everyone does an amazing job, like an amazing job at the engine that is Startmate now. But I advise startups one-on-one, and like, if people want to be the world's best, they've got to just set a certain level of expectation of what they're going to do, and they've got to hold themselves to it. You know, that's what I try to do for the companies I advise. I try and bring the sort of Silicon Valley level of execution and quality and try and bring the best expertise that people can have in their startup to execute what they've got. And it's pretty impressive to see the effect of that when you do that. I think the problem is there's so many accelerators now and even there's a lot of companies going through Startmate. The thing I'm trying to do now is just focus on 3 or 4 companies and try and help them and put all my effort and resources into them. And I think, you know, we've got some great investors here. I think Nicky and the Airtree guys, and you know, they're good, they're really good. And I think if some of the world's best came here, that would be interesting, I think, as well. Just level us up a little bit better. Some of the world's best investors, and they already are investing later on, but could they get here earlier on and just level us up sooner? I think is the biggest opportunity. The most important thing you can do as a founder is separate you from your business. The biggest problem I see with founders in the early stage is when you hear them say words like, "This is my baby," and they treat it like that. Because when you tie your ego to your business and someone gives you negative feedback, you feel like shit. Likewise, when something good happens in the business, you become egotistical and amazing. And that is the wrong attitude to have. You need to be confident in who you are as a person. Go do therapy on yourself, work it out, work out whatever issues you've got. Because you need to be curious when someone gives you negative feedback about your business. When someone says, "Hey, I really don't like this," you're like, "Oh, really?

28:34 Adam Spencer: Cool.

28:34 Dean McEcoy: Why? What is it about that? Tell me more." Because that's how you become successful. I can tell that in a founder when I start to give them some feedback and they get all tense and like, you can see that they're just like, they're about to punch you. And that's one of the biggest problems because that has a flow-on effect. You'll never get the right feedback. The other thing is execute quickly. It's been proven with a lot of research as well. The startup founders that execute fast, where there's a fast cycle time between when you build, measure, learn, are way more successful than the ones that do it slowly. And so, whatever it takes, do it quickly and get it out there. I've always lived by the philosophy of ready, fire, aim. Don't ready, aim, fire. Because people who take too long to— should I pull the trigger? I've only got one bullet. You shoot, you see where you land, and you shoot again, and you see where you land. And that needs to be your attitude. Yeah. Move quickly. And then I think the most important thing is that you're building a movement, not a business. Nobody wants to come and make you more money. Nobody wants to come and make your life easier. You've got to make their life easier. Your job as the CEO and the founder is to create an environment and a mission and a reason to get out of bed every day that's worthwhile. And too many founders think it's the other way around. They have an entitlement. Mm-hmm. Staff should come and work for them and you pay them money. They give you their time, they give up money in return for equity on the hope that it'll be worth something one day. You've got to think about how you're building a mission greater than you, and you can hear that in the language that founders use when they talk about their business. When they say my business, I, mine, they're not the founders that become successful. It's the ones who naturally say we, our, you know, here's Mount Everest, let's go climb it together. So they'd be my 3 most important tips. I think there's a bit of a risk at the moment because startups are becoming hot and it tends to probably attract the sort of people that are looking at the $50 billion valuations of Canva and saying, I want that. And they're the wrong people that we want in this industry because—

30:41 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

30:41 Dean McEcoy: The people that are successful are not the people that set out to create a $50 billion company. They're the people that are so driven and curious about the world and the problems in it, and so driven to find solutions to them. So Melanie and Cliff from Canva, you know, Mel used to teach graphic design and she saw how much it sucked using that software and they tried to build a photo book business and they understood most people don't need to know all the stuff that's in Photoshop. So they had this deep connection with the problem and insights around the problem that no one else did, and they were motivated to go and solve that in a meaningful way. And so I'd encourage potential founders, go and get curious about something. It's very hard to go and find your passion, but your curiosity will lead you there. So whatever you're curious about in the world, just keep digging into it. Dig further.

31:32 Adam Spencer: Yeah.

31:32 Dean McEcoy: Don't sit back and wait for the world to spoon-feed you. Go and get curious and find out and get interested about whatever it is you're interested in. And then when you build that expertise, you've worked out what you love, you work out what the world needs. So go out and talk to people and find out where there's something missing. And then if you overlay what you love, what the world needs, think about where you can get paid. And that's the intersection of a great opportunity. It's actually the— Japanese proverb called ikigai, which really means your reason for being. So I encourage people to not really go out and start businesses just for the sake of starting businesses. Go out and find your reason for being, which is a much more better way to live, much happier way to live, and it'll create more successful companies.

32:21 Adam Spencer: I hope you enjoyed that interview. More interviews are on the way. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Stay tuned for more interviews with many, many more amazing people from the Australian startup ecosystem. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Bye.