In this episode we discuss: The Evolution of a COO: From Doing to Coaching. We are joined by Andrew Robb, Marketplace & Technology Executive, Board Member & Investor

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We chat about the following with Andrew Robb: 

• What does it take to scale a company?
• How does the role of the COO evolve? 
• What does it take to stay engaged and motivated in a role for a long time?
• Focus on what you can control and don't lose sleep over things outside of your control.
• Scaling culture requires clear goals, accountability, and a strong hiring process.
• Be thoughtful about culture, but don't overcomplicate it. It will naturally develop with the right people.

References: 

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewrobb/

Biography: 

Andrew has 25 years’ experience as an executive in technology companies, notably Farfetch where he served as Chief Operating Officer for 10 years until 2020, prior to which he founded fashion ecommerce business Cocosa following time at eBay and in strategy consulting with Gemini in the 1990s. He is currently Chair of edtech business Twinkl and Non-Executive Director of 1stdibs in the US and Carwow and GetHarley in London. He also is a non-executive advisor to the Ministry of Justice. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and a BA Law from Oxford University.

To learn more about Beth and Brandon or to find out about sponsorship opportunities click here. 

Summary:

16:00 Introduction and Background

18:48 The Three Stages of CEO Evolution

20:08 Transitioning to a Coaching Role

20:49 The Importance of Feedback and Results

23:15 The Power of Executive Coaching

29:11 Staying Engaged and Motivated in a Long-Term Role

30:36 Navigating Challenges and Low Points While Scaling

32:12 Scaling Culture: Clear Goals, Accountability, and Hiring

45:23 Patience and Personal Development for Long-Term Success

Brandon 0:05

Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the operations room. I am Brandon medsinga joined by my lovely co host, Bethany Ayers, how are things going? Bethany, busy

Bethany Ayers 0:14

and strange, because I have gone back to peak.

Brandon 0:18

What you've gone back to peak. How's that even possible?

Bethany Ayers 0:22

I don't know. I'm still in shock, as you can tell from that smooth delivery. I had dinner six, eight weeks ago with rich, the CEO, and by the end of the evening, I knew I was just gonna go back. And then I did, and I have to say, this is one of the first times in my life where I have made a big decision without dithering. Might be foolish, it might be wise. We'll find out. But I can remember when I was younger that I would definitely have two options, and I wouldn't know which one to do, and I would have to talk to everybody, and even though, fundamentally, I knew which one I wanted, but, like, I didn't really know, or maybe it didn't make the most sense. And so then I would talk to 20 people, and I would have this like panic, and I would work it through and work it through, and work it through and work it through. And then after like, two weeks, make the decision that was actually in my heart to begin with. And this time, I love the life I've built in the last 18 months. I'm having a great time. I was not considering going back to full time work. And then by the end of the conversation, I was like, Yep, I'm going back to full time work. I could go and spend the next three weeks dithering, or I could just skip it. Don't fancy it. Let's just do it.

Brandon 1:37

So just for context for the listeners, you left PKI, 18 months ago, 24 months ago, something like

Bethany Ayers 1:43

Brandon 2:30

like a little foreboding and kind of being a little scared, I

Bethany Ayers 2:33

suppose. Yeah, so it's like, I'm approaching it as like a big puzzle with a bunch of people I get to hang out with and have some fun with I feel

Brandon 2:41

you in one way, because I think previously, when I've made massive career choices around companies and signing on to whatever I've done, something quite similar. In my gut, I kind of knew what the right thing to do was, but I would always go out to 10 individuals that I respected, have these conversations, and

Bethany Ayers 2:55

it's really nice to just free yourself from that turmoil, wake up in the night. What do I do? What do I do? How do I do? How do I do? Who am I gonna talk to next? And just that, like constant chat, but because I just had such a strong Yeah, I'm gonna do this. It hasn't. I'd have been excited about it, but I haven't been stressed. And obviously, because I'm returning to a company that I know well and have been on the board of so I have been in touch with for the last 18 months. I didn't have any first day of school butterflies. It's been really like a surreal experience. I basically feel like the last 18 months in some way didn't happen, and time has folded in on itself. And I left on a Friday and I came back on a Monday.

Brandon 3:39

So we've got a great topic today, which is how to successfully scale from 2 million to 2 billion. So that is quite a journey. And we have a guest who has done that. His name is Andrew Robb. He's the former CEO of Farfetch, of which he went on a 10 year journey with that company, and he is currently a Ned for a number of phenomenal organizations. So just before we talk to Andrew, I just wanted to ask you a couple questions that he had brought up of interest here, which is Andrew specifically said for that 10 year journey for him to be successful, that he leaned very heavily on coaching and coaches to help him to evolve as a CEO, to be able to scale with that company. The question is, what's your view on coaching when it comes to executives, and in particular the CEO role, and perhaps for yourself. Bethany,

Bethany Ayers 4:24

I think coaching is important. I think therapy is important, and I think mentors are important. Sometimes they're all wrapped up into one, but quite often they're three different people. And I didn't necessarily think that I needed all three concurrently, but I have had all three along my career journey, and they've helped me because, as we've talked about so much on the podcast, good leadership is actually about people, and it's not about techniques and tactics and skill, the soft skills, which are, I think, the hardest skills to develop. And so in order. To connect with people, motivate, lead people. You have to know who you are, and you have to be comfortable with that. And for me, that was a lot of therapy to get to the place where I liked myself enough to like other people. And then coaching, I find quite helps with, like blocked thinking and blocked assumptions. At one point was one of my coaches, I had a lot of problems with somebody in my team, and as far as I was concerned, the problems were with the person in my team, and the coach was just like, what about you? Is making this a problem? And I can't remember what the question was, what was one of those gut punch questions, like, yeah, yeah, okay. And that unlocked that relationship. And then mentors help you with what? All the stuff I just said that doesn't matter, like the skills, how to organize and align people, how to track things in a right way, how to use the right frameworks, all that kind of stuff. What's your experience been? Yeah,

Brandon 5:52

you know, it's fascinating, because I was one of those kind of guys where for almost my entire career as an individual contributor, to being a manager to being a senior leader, I always relied upon my skills and my competence and my kind of strategy chops and my work ethic and all these things, and always viewed the soft skills, the soft side of it, as almost like a I was dismissive of it. And I think what I realized when I got to kind of VP level and beyond, was that it came back to bite me quite heavily. And I realized at some point that I had to get a hold of what was happening, because if truly I was going to continue with my career and my progression, became very apparent to me that the leadership skills, the soft skills, are incredibly important, and at that level, much more so than anything else you can offer in terms of your competence or your skills or whatever. Because the fact of the matter is, you're hiring people below you to perform those functions and to be very useful at doing those things. And you those things. And your job at that point as a VP is to corral and get the best out of individuals, teams and cross functional teams, as well, as well as the executive leadership as a CEO as part of that. So I started working with a coach. He's a leadership coach, and he's been instrumental, I would say, in transforming me from a leadership standpoint, which is, how do I get the best out of leaders? How do we get the best out of myself? How do I get the best out of the CEO? How do I tactically kind of block and tackle issues that we're having with personnel and staff and relationships and all these things, things that fundamentally I wasn't very good at, but with the coach asking me very useful questions that made me see things differently and kind of like the to the point that Andrew made on the podcast, which is I would with him identify here are the five things this year I need to focus on, and then take one of them on that list and really try to exercise it properly over a three to four month period. And I think Andrew had a good example of how to give constructive feedback to individuals, and that is a skill that you can learn, and it's an incredibly important skill, and it really is a soft skill, and that, for me, was a good example that I could relate to whereby I'd done the same thing. I'd taken a good four months to really figure out how to do this properly, to ensure that I was giving feedback in a way that was very helpful for individuals and teams. And the last thing I'll say is that in my Latter Days at my last company, I was very focused on convincing the CEO and the board that every single executive on the leadership team needed to have a coach, and there's a reason why that's tremendously useful to ensure that we're unified as the first team We can work together in ways that are phenomenal, and hence we can actually set that example for the rest of the company. And coaches can really help us accelerate on that path to make sure that we can make that happen. Did

Bethany Ayers 8:31

you have the same coach for everybody or a different coach for everybody?

Brandon 8:34

We gave an amount of money to each individual to source who they felt was the right person for them. In this case, I

Bethany Ayers 8:41

think that actually worked better. I think if everybody had the same Coach, how do you do Chinese wolves?

Brandon 8:47

Exactly. Yeah, you don't. Everyone becomes very nervous because they think it's a feeder system back into the CEO, which is what you don't want. We were very clear with everyone that this is all about trust, and the relationship that you have with a coach is your relationship to have with that coach? It is not for us to be privy to anything. The only thing that we're asking in return is that the coach comes in once every three months, not to give us a readout on your relationship or what you're talking about, but just a readout on progression for collectively that we're all interested in, that we've agreed upon in terms of how best to move that leadership team forward, sounds like a great idea. So the second thing that he spoke about was this philosophy of managing yourself out of a job. You know, as a CEO of the company, you want to grow and professionalize and scale that company, and you want to hire phenomenal talent underneath you. And obviously, from his point of view, in a 10 year run at Farfetch, as he described, he hired a bunch of executives that were great and better than him in some respects, in terms of those functional roles. And I'm just wondering what you think about philosophy fundamentally, which is you're there to ultimately manage yourself out of your position by hiring phenomenal talent for that company. Me

so 100% agree in the philosophy you need to do that in order to grow the business. But where I personally struggle is what to do after you've hired all those people running the team and aligning the team just ends up feeling like a bit of admin and like I'm really highly paid to organize our meetings, and people do the things they're supposed to do, but I think that's actually what a leader is, but it just feels very admin heavy. And I was like, Is this actually my job? Did you ever have that feeling?

I was always of two minds about it, because I kind of know what you're saying. I became so abstracted from the day to day of the business, a large part of my role at the end of it was thinking a lot and spending a lot of time to ensure that leadership was being super effective for the company, and we had good relationships, and we're working well with the CEO and, you know, role responsibilities and yada yada yada. And I was enjoying it. But on the flip side of it, I was also highly aware that I kind of felt like somehow I was not adding the value to the business in a way that I previously did, because I wasn't really doing more of, like a hands on functional leadership role, that sense, as opposed to kind of more this, like leadership curation type thing. And

it took me a long time, and I still don't think I was comfortable with it, that I was doing a good job. Because what, how do you measure that I ran good meetings and that we had good off sites? And I'm not talking about the tea and coffee, but you know, thinking about the agenda and the structure, and how are we going to run the meetings, and how are they not going to be boring, and how do I call out when people are not saying what they mean, and what's getting swept under the rug, and where's the accountability, and how do we build psychological safety? So I'm thinking about all those things, but they're nothing to do with the business. And I think I might have mentioned this. I can't remember if this was the interview with Andrew around how can you tell what good leadership is? You can really, really tell bad leadership, but when you're doing it well, it's hard to tell that it's being done well. So I agree with Andrew's philosophy that you need to hire people who are know the job better than you, but when you're running a bunch of experts, it's very hard to figure out your value, but it's like again, something to bring to a coach and get out of your own way and accept that what you're doing is valuable, even if it's uncomfortable because you're not the expert anymore.

Okay, so the other thing that he had talked about was Farfetch had done nothing on the question of culture upwards of 150 people. And I was wondering what you thought of that, because he seemed to make the argument that it wasn't really needed upwards 150 but post 150 the values being codified, and then trying to activate the values through all sorts of tactics in the company over the course of time, was kind of his singular focus as they scaled the company. So what do you make of that? 150 is not the right marker?

I'm wondering if the reason why they didn't do it to 150 is also because it just wasn't as trendy like I feel like now every business thinks about culture and values and codifying it, and what kind of culture do we want to build at a much, much smaller scale? But that's just because it's trendy, and so I can't really separate what I've read and what I've been told matters and what actually matters. And I guess maybe because I've been in businesses where we've talked about values and had it from the very early part. It helps a bit with hiring, but it also helps with setting expectations, because, let's be honest, like the values of a business are the values of the founder, but if you can articulate what the values of the founder are for other people early, there's just less confusion and there's a clearer expectation.

In my opinion. I think he's wrong. I think when you get to the stage of I don't know what the exact number is, but let's say 3040, 50 people, I think at that point you want to get ahead of some of the stuff, because what I've seen is if you don't, it leads to all sorts of confusion and problems that you just don't need, especially as you get your series A you want to scale that company, all these people related issues that pop up in different forms, largely speaking, in my view, you can avoid a lot of them if you're proactive, to think through some of this stuff. And if you think about the structure of these companies, when you first start out like this, in my view, hiring some kind of people manager at a bit of a mid level to come in to do some of the basic processes and structure stuff when it comes to performance reviews and policies, and starting to run enps surveys and get feedback and that sort of thing, and work with some of the line managers. That makes tremendous sense. I think you also want to bring in a fractional VP of people, or a fractional CPO to help the leaders think through more of this strategic question of culture and maybe how to start activating certain things sooner than later. Some of these questions of how you take the values of an organization, get the behaviors that you want and get the agreements in terms of how we're going to work together or not, start to become incredibly important as you get to more of that 100 person or. Work, and definitely when you go past 100

as well, I think so. But I think what's important, just to reiterate my point, is it's figuring out what the real values are. And so what are the real values of the founder, and not business talk values, because the founder, I don't know who your experience is, my experience has been. The founders will know what they expect and their vision, but they can't always articulate it. And if you can figure out, what are those things that they think is critical? Those are your values. The question

that you've raised is, what is the three things that matter most to the founder in terms of how they want to operate that business, and capturing that, putting that on paper specifically, and making sure that from the recruitment process onward, there's some things you're doing to ensure that those three things are happening. So why don't we Park it here, and we will move on to our conversation with Mr. Andrew Rob

as well. I describe as a commercial CEO, in that I ran operations, but also most of marketing, product engineering, finance, HR, like I had a big chunk of the business, essentially anything that wasn't fashion. So for those who don't know Farfetch, it's a marketplace in the luxury fashion space, and the founder focused on the fashion side of the business side and everything else. It was a pretty broad role. Now, obviously, in the early days, when there's 25 people, there's a huge amount of doing so although you are, yes, I was starting to build out the team. I think our core role in that position is, yeah, there's the running, the bits you're responsible for, but really it's about, how do you take the founders vision and help make that executable and make it work. But in doing that, you're going to be doing an awful lot of work yourself. So a lot of the things we built out in terms of, you know, everything from customer experience ideas to the way that the logistics were going to work, etc, a lot of the thinking came directly from me, not all of it, but a lot of it came directly from me, and I was personally responsible for project managing and leading a lot of those areas. Now, I would say my role, broadly speaking, stayed the same as things scale. But I think of it as three core stages. Probably stage one is the one I just described. Stage two was where you start bringing on more peer level C levels. So at the time, it was really made primarily myself and the founder, kind of running the business. And then maybe two or three years later, we started bringing on new sea levels in other areas, so a CFO, CTO and so on. And at that point, I think there is a transition towards more how do you make the executive team work? And so I was increasingly, I think, spending, I would say roughly 50% of my time on the areas I looked after, and 50% of my time trying to figure out how to help other areas. And I think that is a little different to when there was less of a peer group at the exact level, and it was more just kind of myself and the founder. But I think from the pure CO perspective, the third phase for me is maybe more broadly, just about how you have to evolve as a leader. You know, I very much think by the end, I was managing people who were way better at their jobs than I could be. I could not do any of their jobs better, whereas in the beginning, I could probably have done most of my team's job at least as well as they could do, and if not better. In some cases, by then, that wasn't the case at all. So you're much more the coach and supporter, rather than the kind of driver and the director and so yeah, it's kind of three phases, but it's also, I think, a bit of a continuum that you just go through. What

I find difficult is understanding what the point of my job is when everybody else knows their jobs and defining and understanding whether or not I'm being a good leader. Did you ever struggle with that identity, or you effort in it? I didn't

that much, to be honest, but I think that's more because I just maybe partly because our founder was kind of, he's quite kind of Zen in his approach to stuff, but I've always been quite growth mindset. So I just cared about like, am I learning? Am I doing great? I remember early on saying to our founder, look, at some point I'm not going to be the right person to do this job. It's either going to be too big or I'm not going to have developed faster forever. And when that happens, you need to tell me, I'll be, I'm sure, emotional about it, but you got to tell me, and I will step aside and do the right thing for the business. But it's not going to be through lack of me busting my ass and doing everything I can to kind of develop on that journey, I kind of took a view of, look, if I'm not the right guy, at some point, I'm not the right guy. If I hire a team that don't need me, they don't need me. So this whole idea of you should manage yourself out of a job that people talk about, I really do believe it's the right framework to have the fear that comes from it, which is, I don't want to be out of a job. I like my job. I want to stay in my job. I don't think it manifests. And I just didn't believe it was going to happen.

It's not really a fear of managing out of the job. It's more, how do I know I'm doing a good job? Because for me, leadership, it's really obvious when leadership is. Bad, but when leadership is good, it's hard to identify. And so did you figure out how you knew you were doing a good job?

I mean, I think there are the tangible things around Are you successfully hiring talent that is clearly a level above where you were before? I always think about it in sporting metaphor, like you're in the Premier League. Now, are you hiring Premier League talent, or are you in the Champions League? You're hiring Champions League talent. I know that I was doing that because I had people in other teams saying, hey, you've really evolved your team a lot faster than others have. So I was getting direct, unprompted feedback for people saying that that piece was doing well. But then once you have them on, then it's a kind of well, are they being successful? And, you know, again, I think there's the tangible stuff, well, are they happy? Are they driving great results? Do they give you good feeling? I'm constantly asking for feedback all the time, and you're just trying to, you know, stitch together the dots that give you confidence that you are doing the right thing. So, but I think the critical transition for me was this switch from a kind of directive mentality to a coaching mentality. It's easier to do when you've got the people that are the right kind of people to do that with. As I think back to kind of how did I know I just was getting good, both prompted and unprompted feedback from all levels, from the board, from my boss, from critically, from my team, that gave me a pretty good signal that I was not by far from perfect, but doing a solid job at it.

And then in that third phase, you talked about one aspect, I think, here, which is you're moving from less of a directive role more into a coaching role. So then midpoint that you talked about where you're still running functions within the company, and half your time is spent on the executive leadership to make sure that's operating properly. And then heading into that third phase that you discussed what was missing in your arsenal, and what did you really have to kind of step up or enhance to really be an effective person for that third phase of the company? And I guess more in this kind of coaching realm,

perhaps I always took quite a proactive view to my own personal development. So I kind of took the view of, look, I can't control how the company will develop, what it will need and so on, but I can have a pretty good idea of what I will need to evolve. What do I think is needed for me as a COO in the next phase, whether that and I was like, whether it was at Farfetch or not, you know, what were the things that I needed to develop? And then I was like, any good CEO, very practical and structured about it. I was like, Okay, here's the 10 things I think they are. I'm going to go check see if everyone else agrees, and ask them formally or informally for thoughts on that. Then I prioritize one or two, Max every six months, and say, right, for the next six months, I'm going to really work on this thing. I think most of the things that we need to develop beyond the point of being if you're already a CEO, is mostly going to be around leadership and the people side of things. So for me, it was things like, how do I get better and better at giving feedback? How do I get better as a coach? I think coaching is an area where you can go properly down the rabbit hole on how to think about and do that, and then in terms of, like, what are the tools that I would use to do that. There are books, there's loads of stuff online, there's podcasts, there are coaches, and then there's on the job. And I think because probably 80% of it and then the rest just tops it up. I personally found working with executive coaches extremely powerful. It's one of those things, especially when I talk to founders now who are thinking of doing it themselves. I'm extremely confident it helped me grow as a leader. I just can't prove it, and I can't tell you exactly what and when and who, and I just know that it made me much better as as things evolved. So do

you think coaches or mentors or a combination of a coach who can also be a mentor is the most effective

I typically found I would change coaches out every 18 months. Two years, you'd start kind of getting diminishing returns off of it. I had my kind of network who were like informal mentors. And then within the coaching world, obviously those who I would describe a bit more therapy driven, and those who are a bit more kind of practical driven. I think it really depends on, you know, how you are as an individual, but also what it is you're trying to work on. So I actually have had success from all three of those types. I think if you're being from a purist standpoint, a coach is not a mentor. So I don't think you can be a coach and a mentor at the same time. So I think you can have the same person being your coach and mentor, but they need to change hats when they're doing it. So I do think they are fundamentally different things. I think a coach's core role is to help you figure out how to be the best player and so that, I think they can do things that mentors can't. They're not as good at being able to help you grow your kind of underlying foundation as a leader. I think coaching is better for that, agree,

except for when you have somebody who can who is both, I actually find that quite helpful, because then you can flip in a conversation between the two. Practically, what's going on with the OKRs? How have you made OKRs work? This is happening, and it might be that it stays in a practical conversation, or it might be, actually, you're bringing all kinds of your own shit. It that suddenly becomes a coaching conversation and you realize all of the blind spots that you have. And I find it kind of helpful when the coach understands where you've been, versus like the totally purest coach who doesn't know anything but can ask the killer question. I find that quite frustrating.

I don't think it's dogmatic on this stuff. I actually think that what tends to happen is, when people have that business experience, it's like they cross through a credibility wall. And so yeah, it may or may not be more helpful on the individual problem, but it's more a willingness that, oh yeah, this person kind of knows where I'm coming from, and therefore I'm going to listen to them more. And

so do you think that is what made you be able to learn the skills from 25 people, managing 25 people through to an absolutely massive organization of leaders, of leaders, of leaders. I

think it was a big help in doing the journey. But you can kind of break down what are the specific things you need to have at that level. Some of it's quite practical stuff, and some of it's much kind of, you know, softer and more leadership things, and think about, well, where are your gaps? And then try and plug those gaps. And I viewed it as well. I'm just trying to plug those gaps before they become a problem. A lot of it, though, I think, is, like said, is on the job. So I was very fortunate that I had a founder and a CEO who was very much of the same, similar mindset. He wasn't trigger happy. It's probably the right way of putting it. It was extremely unlikely for him to ever act on someone who was genuinely struggling or underperforming. He would back them back and back them. Now that's a double edged sword, right? The Pro was I felt I could take risks, take decisions, make mistakes, and I didn't have a piano hanging over my head that was going to drop and end my career, but also meant I was able to learn as I was doing, and not everyone gets that opportunity. Part of this is just timing grade. If you're constantly taking on new things and you're constantly stretching yourself and trying new things, mainly on the job, you either fail and leave or you get there. But it takes time, and not everyone will give people that time. So

when you think about operations conceptually as a function, and people that do operations within companies, within Farfetch, how do you view the operations function in terms of actual individuals doing operations specifically? So did you actually have operations individuals are reported into over the course of time? Or how did that evolve from the early days to the latter days?

We had an operations team that was run by a ops director, became a VP ops, and evolved from there. And for us, operations meant customer facing things. So customer service, logistics, payments, supplier problem resolution, Fraud Management, etc. So that's what we called operations, and that was one of the functions I was responsible for. I think back to this kind of point about what is a COO. I very much think there are three broad archetypes, but it's very nuanced across them. One is the person who's running that function I just described. So they are running the nuts and bolts the warehouse that whatever that actually makes the product get to customers. The second is, the more business operations, so kind of sitting in the background as a support function, you know, that can be everything from strategy to facilities management to executive assistant support, you know, kind of making the internal side work, typically, with internal customers. And then the third type is the more commercial one who has revenue targets. Essentially, we'll typically have a revenue facing team, usually in addition to some of those. So again, my role as a COO was the broader one, but then we had a specific operations function within that. And then we had business operations. We didn't call it that, but we had that equivalent in another area as well. In a marketplace business, you think about there's sort of two core commercial functions. There's the supply side, so who goes out and gets suppliers and product onto the site, and then there's the demand side, who goes out and gets customers. And I was in the demand side, so I didn't have the supply side reporting in, but I did have all the demand side. So even though we were functionally organized, I was the person kind of knitting all of that together so that the supply and the demand side was balanced and growing.

How long were you there?

10 years.

I really struggle after about four. How did you do 10? I know you're going to say it, because it's always a different business, but how did you really do 10? Year

one is a huge learning curve. You don't know what you're doing, you try and figure out. Year two, you kind of know what you're doing, you start really kind of kicking ass. And then year three, you start to go, what's next. And then the circle of life kind of repeats. And now within Farfetch, I was fortunate that as I got to the end of one of those three year, or midway through that third year, things did evolve. And I don't just mean the business growing, but, you know, we had a reorganization of the exec team, and I absorbed a lot of new things, or whatever, you know, so, like, the role really did kind of, like, fundamentally change enough that I was like, oh, that's scary. Again. I like to go into working with a little bit of fear. I want to think, I don't know how what I'm doing, and don't really know how to get through this as soon. As it starts to become, like, easy or not easy, repetitive is probably a better word. It's kind of less interesting. And I was just fortunate that my three year cycles, I managed to do three of them at Farfetch effectively, which, you know, and again, a little bit of planning on my part, and a little bit of luck that, you know, the business happened to just kind of evolve in that way. There was one time when the business was doing super well and I just wasn't happy in the role. I felt like I was getting frustrated on certain things, and I wasn't scared anymore. I wasn't learning at the same pace. And, you know, there were definitely times where I thought about jumping off, but fortunately, was able to move things on enough to then stay I

think, as a CEO, you're under tremendous pressure to do a bunch of stuff. And your ability to go from one thing to the next rapidly in different kind of areas within the company is there's just a lot of stuff to be done. It can be quite complex and mind bending sometimes maybe just talking us through perhaps one of your lowest points in terms of what happened, why it happened, what you learned from it?

Lowest point, gosh, my personal low points, I think they were all to do with when I felt there were people in the business who I didn't think were right for what we were doing at the time, and for the next phase. Like, if you think about like stress, there are, I don't know if this holds, by the way, but I quite liked it, which is, there are two kinds of stress. There's busy stress and frustration stress. The first one's really fun. The second one will kill you. And you know, I think that kind of, if you're looking at things again out of your control, but are having material impact on your day to day existence, it can make you feel really down and low. And we're all very impatient, you know, we all want stuff done tomorrow, and we see things really clearly, and we want things, you know, I do think particularly building startups, it takes a long time. And there is, I think, one of the reasons why I was able to stay a while and stay through difficult moments like that is just an ability to kind of accept that you can't fix every problem. I used to describe it as you've got to accept the rules of crap lying all over the business that you know you could fix but you can't. And I do think that we're not, you know, CEOs generally, what makes them good make them quite bad at doing that. And so I do think learning to just have level of acceptance around that's important, whether it's at these big issues or individual ones like the one I described.

Thanks for sharing that, Andrew, because it's amazing how much people impact like we all focus on processes, we focus on tools. We give lip service to people, but fundamentally, it's just about the people. It's about the people that we work with. It's about the people that we lead, and it's about how we get everybody pointed in one direction together. Which leads me to the question that I had, which was, how did you retain culture, slash scale it to what you wanted it to be, and keep productivity high while growing from those numbers.

I've never thought of them as connected questions. I mean, on the culture point, we didn't do anything on it at all till we were about 150 people. So we didn't have values written down. That doesn't mean we didn't have a strong culture. Of course, we did. Cultures exist by definition. They're like, you know, it's like air, you know, it's going to be there. The reason why we then wrote it down was because we'd made it one hire in particular that really didn't work out. That was clearly just culturally not right. This person, I thought was very good individual. Nothing against them in personally, but they just were not good. Culture fit. It had helped. I think I, you know, I'd been at eBay earlier in my career, who I thought were very good at the culture piece. And so it kind of was very obvious to me that, like, if we don't do something, we're going to lose control. But we're that classic kind of tribe size, you know, 150 people. You can't interview everyone. You're losing. So we then really switched into, okay, we need to productize This effectively. And we did all the stuff that most people do, right? We wrote down the values. We started working on plans around how we would express those and so on. We were very, very mechanical about it. You know, we were very much like, I think most of the stuff around culture upper with one exception to come back to, is relatively tactical. So it's like, okay, this quarter, what are we going to focus on, and what are the three things that we're going to do that are going to try and expand people's understanding of this particular value. And so it was like very much, values activity review and kind of run it operationally effectively. Because I think, yeah, ranked down, the values does not much. I think it's what you do with it and the way you express it. But I think you can be, again, quite practical about it. The by far and away, the most important thing in culture, maintenance, recruitment, I got told this once by Laszlo Bock, who I'm sure many people have read the book he did. He built the Google kind of HR machine, and he said this to me, if you're growing at, let's say, 50% I'm gonna get these numbers wrong, but that people can do their own if you're going at 50% then the people that are going to be in the business in, say, four years time, 80% of them are not here today. So the number one thing you need to do to either maintain or change culture is much easier to change culture in a growing business through recruiting different types of people than it is through changing the culture of the people that you've got, because that's ingrained and it's been built that way. If there's one thing you do, it's recruitment, the rest should be much. Easier. The Productivity piece, that's an interesting one. First of all, did we maintain productivity? I don't know. I'm not convinced that we were as productive as we got bigger, as we were when we smaller and but maybe that's just kind of a truism in general. I think much more important to productivity than culture is kind of org design and ways of working. So the thing that I found problematic as we scaled was as we got above 150 to say 500 a lot was around culture 500 to say 1000 1500 a lot of it was strategic planning. But what are the priorities? What are we trying to work on? And how do we make sure that really important things get done? That works for a while, but there comes a point which was around when I left, actually when it's not enough, because it's just too complicated. No human brain can know what 2000 people are doing or can think about the complexity about so if you've built the company at that stage to be quite interdependent, it's very difficult to maintain process as soon as you're trying to change something over here, it goes through 20 different areas to then make it happen. And and I knew this was a challenge, because we're working on one big new thing. And I remember chatting to one of the engineering teams and saying, Hey, how's the sprint going? And they were like, yeah, it's gone really well, except, apart from where to spend 50% of our time helping these guys out on something. And you start hearing things like that, and you know, like, no one's doing anything wrong. Anything wrong. People are working super hard. They're doing the right what they think is the right thing for the business, but it's fundamentally causing a productivity problem, because you suddenly things aren't moving as fast because of all the dependencies and and that's where you start to talk about things like business unit structures and things like that. And I do think, as you scale, you have to think about things in a different way, and whether or not I don't think we did that quick enough, for sure, we were too slow to do that. I

talked to our Product Manager from Amazon. I asked him what he'd done over the past year at Amazon, and he was explaining to me that they'd made a structural pricing change to Amazon, and he'd spent a full year working across 25 different functions within Amazon to make the one pricing structural change. That's literally all he had done for 12 months. So it's pretty amazing, I think, in these larger companies, and that's

the company that's famous for its, you know, two pizza team rule, and for trying to make their architecture and org design as nimble and scalable as possible. And they still struggled with it at one point. I always thought about getting T shirts saying dependencies are the devil and just giving out to everyone. You got to think about this stuff and like, how does the organization need to work at this next stage? And knowing that how you done it before probably isn't going to work as well at that next stage. And again, I think I didn't always get that right, but we tried.

So over the scale of that journey, what was your approach to accountability, to ensure that not just leadership but the wider organization was being held to account? And like you just mentioned, I suspect, of much larger numbers, this is quite difficult to know and to feel like the company is accountable. You know, from the top level down to the individuals that are kind of on the ground doing things.

We very much use our version of OKRs. Sometimes I think we overcomplicate this stuff, right? We just want people to have really clear view on what they're trying to achieve and what good will look like, and then obviously have a sort of performance review process that works. We very much and I'm really happy we did this focused as a more to more like developmental approach to this. So we're much more interested in trying to figure out, how do we help people get better. So take that more like a positive lens to it. Not everyone does that, though. I'm not saying it's the only way. We didn't use force distributions, but we did use distributions. I think you need a forcing mechanism that creates a level of clarity on Well, exactly how are people doing? And I think people want that even if they don't like the answer they want to be told, Look, yeah, you're here. Are some things you really, really need to work on. And in some cases, that also means where you've done an incredible job, but the thing's not worked. In that example, that person has to be accountable for the result, but I'm not going to beat them up because they did an amazing job. My number one pet, hey, are people that can't put their hand up and say, Yeah, that's us. We got that wrong. If someone can do that, I know they're going to be fine, because they will figure it out. They're doing the best that they can do if they don't have the skills that's on me and I need to figure out how to help them or change them, but if they're doing everything and owning stuff, it didn't work in all areas for us. I definitely felt that some parts of our business were much stronger on accountability and really kind of results orientation. Let's call it that. For example, we had a large, a huge team in Portugal. You know, the company was kind of split between the UK and Portugal, and incredible people in both countries. The historic culture in Portuguese companies is, I would be Mr. Rob. Okay, I'd be Mr. Rob, and if something went wrong, and I would shout at everyone, and I would tell them, they're all idiots, and then I would leave the room. But I couldn't actually fire anyone, because I'm not allowed to do to the labor laws. So you have this very like us and them, management and team, culturally in the country, in the old school, especially when we started out, they loved working somewhere that was more, as they determined, called. Anglo Saxon in terms of style. But sometimes, some of the things where I would talk more around results orientation, sometimes I would hear back from people we shouldn't measure this, because then we'll get, you know, into trouble for it. I'm like, no, no, no, we'll measure this, because then, if it's not working, we can fix it. It sounds very obvious and very kind of, I think standard, if you will, in a UK or an American company, not so in approaches. And I'm sure it's similar in a lot of southern Europe, actually, not because those people didn't want to be results oriented, but they're just so used to the narrative around it being we're going to get beat it, beat it up for this. It's harder, I think, doing it in an international setting, but I do think try as much as possible, trying to be we want to be accountable for our results, own the mistakes, and just get better every day. Rather than you failed, you're fired. But that cultural version also exists in very successful companies as well. So I think it's more philosophical choice, rather than, you know, a truism.

What's your favorite stage? If you're going to do it again, where would you start?

I really love the growth stage. It's probably like Series C and beyond in kind of tech terminology, mainly because you're starting to work with much more complicated leadership issues. It's always hard. But when you're in the very in your in that zero to one phase, so many of the conversations I have with founders, even you know, when they're that stage is kind of a don't worry about that, worry about that later. Don't worry about that, worry about that later, and it just focus on building a brilliant product or figuring out how to sell it and worry about the rest later. I much more enjoy the building the company bit than I do the building the product bit.

So you talked about before that. You didn't even think about culture upwards of 150 people within Farfetch. Would you recommend that as a thing for founders in terms of what to think about, what to focus on? Basically, because I know a lot of founders in 2024 they take this very seriously from out of the gates, which is, do we have a culture that is amazing? Can we attract talent based on our culture? It's really important to me as a founder to have a great culture. Therefore, they spend a lot of mind share focus on it, from, you know, seed upwards of whatever, Series C, in this case, is that a mistake? Do you think?

Look, I think it is useful to be thoughtful about it. I think in hindsight, we should have probably written down what we thought good look like and what it was we were trying to do. But cultures are the personification of the founder. So however, the founder is, is what's going to come out the other end. So therefore, do they need to spend a ton of time on it. I'm not convinced that we ended up building a really good culture spending zero time working on it, zero. So how did we manage to do that? Because either by design or luck, we managed to hire some really great people who all and part of our decision making was, do we think these are going to be fun people to work with, who are going to work the way we like to work. But it wasn't structured. We did it structured later. So it's really reliant to, you know, the three or four key people who are doing all the hiring. I mean about to what I said before. So I think that should you do put something into it? Yeah, I think you should. But I think over obsessing on it. If you're a founder and you're interviewing every single person, that's much more important than any kind of like culture, driving activity you want to do, and then just be instinctive about it. I have seen some companies where they felt the culture kind of went quite quickly. Why? Because they hired people it didn't fit. But I'm not convinced if they'd been really thoughtful about their hiring process, it would have necessarily changed the result, and my guess is they just weren't very good at hiring. The next time they'll do it, they'll do it much better, and maybe they just had to go through that learning. So I'd say what I'm really skeptical of is of people who say culture is the only thing that matters. Anyone who says that, to me is talking nonsense. It's a very important, useful tool as to how the business grows. But this whole like culture eats strategy for breakfast. Don't agree at all. You need all of it. You're going to build an amazing company. Your brilliant strategy, well executed with an awesome culture. There is no like option there that you can go, oh, actually, you know what? I'm just going to take culture. So I just think there's a little bit too much management bingo going on when people say stuff like that,

but it became really the flavor of the month for a very long time, the flavor of the decade and a half.

Just the final thing I'd say, in culture, you know, for whatever culture that you as an individual think is the right one, I will give you an example, one that's diametrically opposite, that's been incredibly successful. Amazon's a great example. Amazon is a pretty aggressive, adversarial, two degree cut through individualistic, whatever, and they'd probably disagree if they heard me say that, but it's very different to say on eBay, well, Amazon totally won that. So I just think it's something that you can scale later, but you start to get right through the founders Force of Will in the beginning, there's

a lot of research, including research that Maddie Cross did when she was at notion that basically, companies that change their execs every 18 months to three years on average to succeed much better than the ones that hold their execs throughout and so therefore you're an outlier. Yeah. And I also reading between the lines, suspect that some of your frustration was maybe not moving out stage specific experts fast enough. If somebody wants to be an outlier like you, you have growth mindset, which is really clear. But what is it in your personality, beyond growth mindset that has made you be successful. So I

think if you're going to stick with things a long time, you need a growth mindset that needs to translate into actual personal development. But it does work, so it can be done. Secondly, you need patience. Every single coo I speak to always within five minutes. There's two conversations. One is, how do I manage the founder, and the other is, how do I develop my career? Always 100% hit rate on that. The second one is anxiety. It's kind of people going, Oh, I'm really ambitious and I really want to keep going, and I'm worried if I don't move forward, every day, I'm going to die or whatever, but you have to learn to control that urge, because I think that great CEOs have it by definition. So it's a bit like a paradox, internal paradox you have to deal with, but you need to manage that so that you don't just jump off, or you don't let the frustrations consume you. You have to develop coping mechanisms. Again, I think coaching is very helpful for those kinds of things. And then the third was this patience point, and that isn't just you, but you need a founder who and a board and everyone who are also patient to a degree. Now, based on that notion research, I would argue that most founders may be too patient, so maybe that's like a given, but it is important, right? Because you can't get there without making mistakes or having low points. It is going to be an up and down journey.

What you're saying reminds me of the AA, it's always amazing to me that it's Alcoholics Anonymous that came up with this, and it's not in the Bible, because it seems like a Bible thing, which is, what is it like? The strength to change what I can, the patience to accept what I can't, and the wisdom to tell the difference between the two. And paraphrasing, you can tell I've not been through AA, but I love it, and I just keep thinking, how's it not in the Bible? And it sounds like that's what you're living, yeah, and like, I

think a lot of it comes with some of it comes with experience and just time. And we all grow up in a world where it's all so fast paced, and it's all about achieving and then the next grade and next year's exams and the next degree, and then, you know, this sort of Treadmill. But you know, I do think you know, with some of these things that were, you know, some of the leadership points, you just can't learn it in a year. You know, you need time to do that, but time is something when you're used to things changing so fast that people don't always get given

So Andrew, final question is, if our listeners can only remember one thing from our talk today, what would that be? I think

it would be that you are in control of your future path and focus on the things that you can do to change that, not what the world will will need to do to give you it

perfect. So when I think of Alcoholics Anonymous, I think about the Bible, I will think about this conversation and Andrew Rob So Thank you for joining us on the operations room. You